


The Prison Of His Days

by fadeverb



Series: Leo [34]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 11:22:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 27,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1603355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once in a while, a job goes bad. Leo was not as prepared for this as he thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which We Are Suspiciously Lucky

We've spent most of an hour stripping the contents of this apartment for the key, and I am desperately bored. It would be one thing if we could just toss the place; destructive searches are easy. Unfortunately, the job we're on isn't moving fast enough to make either of us comfortable with making it obvious that we've stolen this key. Thus we're obliged to be _careful_ , which isn't exactly suiting my mood right now.

"No one needs this many books," Zhune says. He's taken the job of checking the shelves, on the principle that if I do that I may stop to read something. While he's perfectly literate (so long as the books in question are the kinds of implausible spy thrillers they sell in grocery stores), he's also willing to take every single book off the shelf in turn, check it, and return it exactly in place. He has every ounce of patience that I do not right now.

He's also annoyed, even if he's doing a pretty good job of not showing it. That's the kind of comment that's designed to start an argument. "College professors, apparently," I say, rather than taking the bait. I shut another dresser drawer, and resist the increasing urge to make things break apart. It's been a long evening. With this luck, it's not getting any shorter. "If you're so bored, want to switch zones?"

"No, Leah." He pulls, checks, and replaces books with a brisk efficiency I'd admire more on nights that aren't this one. Right now it seems calculated to spite me with a show of how much faster he's moving than I am, possibly because he took the easiest part of this job. "You can look at all the pretty picture books after we have the key."

"At this rate, our distraction will run out before we're finished." I open the closet door gingerly, but nothing falls out. The man (seventy percent chance of angel, by our information) who owns this place is tidier than the owners of the last three places we checked. I would be more appreciative if he had been stupid enough to hide this damn key in one of the obvious locations that we checked first. There are the places that everyone hides important things, and then the places that people who are trying to avoid _those_ places hide things, and then there are the places where people who have searched for hidden items professionally, like Zhune and I have, hide things. We checked all those first. Now we're working through every single other place in this apartment, and what single man needs a three bedroom apartment, anyway? At that point you might as well buy your own place.

So far he seems to need the room for all the bookshelves. We might be here until dawn.

"She'll call if she can't hold his attention," Zhune says. "What's in the closet?"

"Camping gear. Clothes." I crouch down to see what's on the bottom layer. People who hide things in closets like to pile other things on top of them. "A forty-year-old set of encyclopedias. Who keeps this sort of thing?"

"Historians?"

"But he teaches _art_ history. Whatever art is, it's not this." I slide the top book off the stack. "Did you know that the aardvark is the sole representative of the Tubulidentata order of mammals?"

"Leah--"

"Yes, yes, I'm searching. Forever." I close my eyes for a moment, and don't break _anything_. Then I move on to the next volume. "If you were an art historian, where would you hide the key to an ancient artifact?"

"It's not ancient," Zhune says. "A few thousand years old, tops. You could simply--" He stops short as we both catch the sound of the front door being unlocked. "Keep looking," he says. "No reading."

My partner strides away, and I pull out another volume of the encyclopedia. Yes, he would keep all the interesting parts of this job to himself.

Frankly, the job's been nothing but trouble so far. I've never liked working for people with extra words stapled to their names, whether it's a distinction or an actual Word. This round's underneath a Baron; I have let Zhune do all the talking, because the man's a complete asshole.

The Baron, I mean. Not Zhune. My partner is exactly as infuriating and affectionate and serene and smug as ever. And he's the one with the reputation that has people tracking us down when they want a finicky job handled at the last minute.

When we got the job, I didn't think it was particularly finicky. One item to retrieve. Check. Except that we've been hitting complications and quagmires at every turn. A week of work, and we're _finally_ in the right place to get the key to open up the artifact safe (which we determined we can't just steal wholesale in any reasonable amount of time) in which the item that Baron wants is, in theory, stored. If his information turns out to be bad on that, too, I swear I am going to take a building down before moving on to the next approach on this project.

Something thuds onto the carpet of the living room. Probably the apartment's resident. I sit back on my heels, and stifle a sigh. If we're playing it like that, doesn't do a lot of good to search carefully.

The rattle of disturbance is enough to have me sidling out of the room and down the hall to take a careful look. It didn't sound like anything important--just someone trying to do a little better in the fight, not a Song or some attunement that runs on Essence--but that does rather confirm that we're not dealing with a human, here. My partner doesn't blow _that_ much Essence on fighting this early in. Not without calling in reinforcements.

Zhune has the man held up by the throat in one hand. He's showing off; no one needs to do a fucking Darth Vader grip when they have two good hands. He is also considerate enough to have arranged this such that the man being strangled has his back to the hallway.

I raise my eyebrows at Zhune. Everything well in hand? Yes?

His expression grows a touch more smug.

And then there's another rattle of disturbance, as the angel throws what must be the rest of his Essence (unless I'm judging the noise wrong, or he's a lot bigger than we thought, both of which are possibilities not to be discounted out of hand) into--an invocation.

We are all holding our breath for an instant.

Well, the angel's not doing much breathing, but it's that sort of moment regardless.

But no one breaks in the door to save him. No fanfares, nothing sneaky. If his call was received, it got the answering machine, or enough of a delay to count as such. Zhune drops him on the couch where it's easier to go through his pockets. "I thought you were checking the closet."

"And I thought you might need help."

"Clearly," he says, "I don't." He holds up a stone tablet the size of a deck of cards. "We can go."

"That fucker had it on him all along?"

Zhune tosses me the key. It's uncomfortably heavy; feels and looks like some kind of granite, but it has the weight of a slab of lead twice its size. "Hides well on a person. Not so well in a house."

He's better at working out the nature of artifacts than I am, but when I slide the tablet into the pocket of my jacket, the weight vanishes, and there's no visible bulge. "Handy. Let's get out of here."

"What, you don't want to stop and take a few books for the road? As long as we're here."

Actually, there _were_ a few great books on ancient Indian architecture on one of the shelves, but I'm not about to admit my interest while Zhune's being this much of a jerk about it. When he starts sounding considerate, it's time for me to worry. "How about we keep moving, since we have what we need, _and_ we've put security around our target on the alert?"

Zhune nudges the body on the couch with one knee. I can't tell from where I'm standing if the man's still alive or not. "We can't hit that until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. Not unless their routine changes. If no one discovers he's missing before then, we'll be fine."

"If."

"Would you rather have spent all night searching, while he was out with the key in his pocket?" My partner puts a hand between my shoulder blades and spins me around. "Pick out a book so that you're not bored and sulking all day tomorrow."

"I do not--"

"Whatever you want to call it," Zhune says, with infinite patience. I mentioned how infuriating he could be. "I'll get this out of the way in case anyone stops by. The place still looks clean."

And he's right. He took that angel down without so much as knocking over a lamp. I stifle a variety of comments that he'd only dismiss as immature, and try to focus on the job. "Meet you at the car?"

"I'm getting a new one. Wait by the curb." 

"Fine." I leave him to do body management, and stalk back to one of the rooms. All these bookshelves, all these books, for one idiot angel who couldn't stay out for a full evening when he had a distraction lined up to keep him out. Maybe he could've enjoyed this life a while longer if he'd had more sense. Or if he had been less diligent, I don't know.

I stare at the angel's bookshelves for a few minutes. Can't even hear the door open and close, but I know Zhune's left. He sneaks as casually and effectively as a Balseraph lies.

There is a large part of me that doesn't want to go down to the curb and meet him. Not in any sort of ridiculous _time to run away_ sense. It's only that when he starts offering me things I want, it generally means he wants something in return. And he wouldn't bother with the bribes unless he expected me to argue about it.

No use borrowing trouble, is it? I grab a book, and head outside. Because I am a conscientious professional Thief, I also remember to lock the door behind me.

Zhune's at the curb in a car I suspect belonged to the man he just strangled. He unlocks the door for the passenger side, and doesn't give up the keys. So I slide on in like I don't mind letting him drive, book in hand.

"We should call it in," I say. "Given how much trouble it's been so far. It'd be nice to look competent for a few hours."

"Later," Zhune says, and pulls away from the curb without hitting anything for once. "Now that we have the key, we need to work out our approach."

"What's changed? We already planned for what we'd do if--"

"We just need to make sure we're on the same page, Leah," Zhune says. I always hate it when he calls me by that name. Wish I'd never suggested it to go with this vessel. It's not like I have a Role to make it useful. "Relax, would you? Every time something goes off plan, you act like it's the end of the world. So we'll do this slowly and carefully and not make any mistakes."

"We don't make mistakes," I say. The book on my knees, seat belt on, and the street lights sliding past the window as he drives on. "We just correct for the universe fucking with us."

It does that a lot, lately.


	2. In Which I Am Surprised To Discover That, After This Many Years, My Partner Can Still Find Entirely New Ways To Upset Me

Tonight's safehouse is located in a nearly abandoned suburban housing development. Nearly, because on the drive in through the ludicrously twisted streets--I could go on about that design "feature" for some time, but let's not get distracted--we pass two houses with signs of habitation. Some poor bastards who are still holding on to property they can't sell for a fraction of its price, probably while drowning under the mortgage they took for it. Some days I wonder if the housing bubble was collaboration between Greed and Fire, given the results, or more of a Gluttony project. That Word's especially good at pushing people into excess that crashes down at the end.

It's almost enough to make me wonder if Gluttony will implode, at some point. The Word seems suited to that. But since the Prince of Death is still alive (as far as I know), it's clearly the case that not all Words have to be internally directed. Inflicting it on other people will suffice.

The garage door has been padlocked shut; Zhune gets out of the car to pick the lock and haul the door open, and then returns to the car to bring us inside before I can quite decide to slide over to the driver's seat and take over. Inside, a tennis ball on a string bounces wildly off the windshield, and something crunches.

"And you were doing so well," I say. "That was, what, most of an hour without hitting anything?"

"And I still haven't hit anything important."

"Except the car."

"They wouldn't call it the bumper if they didn't mean for it to bump into things." Zhune gets out of the car. He closes the garage door in one rattling motion that leaves us in darkness, now that the headlights are off. "Flashlight's in the glove box."

I find it and get us some light. "What a lovely place you've found for us to spend the night. We couldn't have stopped at a diner?"

"A diner's not secure enough." Zhune's eyes narrow when I pass the beam of the flashlight over his face. "Go inside, Leah. There are plenty of lights in the basement."

"The suburbs have basements now? Fancy." Or maybe it's just that this is on the edges of tornado territory, and once in a while the human species pays attention to its own self-preservation. In bits and pieces and irregular flailing starts, they often do. Building codes, however poorly enforced, are proof of that.

I haul my book out of the car, and play the flashlight over the walls until I find the door to the house. Zhune will be smug when he reaches the basement without the flashlight. As if I won't have realized that he's been here before, and already knows the way. "How about a motel? That's been secure enough for all our planning before."

"You don't like motels," Zhune says. "It's one of your many odd preferences which I do occasionally humor, though if you'd rather I not, we can turn right back around and find one."

He would rather I not. And if I say yes, let's do just that, there are any number of ways this could go. Most of them not to my taste. Let's take a chance on the devil I don't know. "Just saying." I leave him by the car for whatever he's scheming. He might just like to leave me wondering. That's the explanation for a quarter of his disappearances, I'm sure. 

At least half seem to do with keeping his clothes in good order. I slouch around in ripped jeans, he only looks less than stylish and sharp if he's been in a fight less than an hour ago. And not always then. We're a soundtrack away from being a buddy cop movie. Or a spy film where I'm the comedy sidekick.

Whatever Zhune says, I'm not a Bond girl. They're better dressed and--okay, I'm not sure that they die that much more often than I do, but they tend not to come back after the death. Probably. Can't say that I've looked too closely at the source material, and _Quantum of Solace_ still can't come up between us without resulting in a half-hour argument.

The basement stairs descend from a door in the hallway between laundry room and kitchen. Or a doorway, I suppose, as the door's leaning against the wall, hinges ripped out and a hole through the top panel.

I pause for a moment with the flashlight to match where the hinges would've been against the door frame. Whoever put that hole in it was punching from the stairs. That's not ominous at all.

But nothing descends on me while I descend the stairs, aside from the usual sense of creeping anxiety that shows up when Zhune decides he wants to play games. The basement does have functional lights: a line of irregularly-spaced bulbs hangs from the ceiling, to make spotlights and shadows in overlapping pools across the floor. The walls are cracked and damp. I would not want to try to sell this house even without the decaying complex around it.

Because my partner is not a few steps behind me--yes, that is a reason to worry, but I'm trying not to let it distract me--I haul a chair beneath one of the brighter bulbs and set up with my book, where I can see the stairs. The furniture down here is designed for celestials, not humans. No fridge, no running water that I can see (unless you count the wall cracks), a single stained mattress. A few card tables, too many mismatched chairs. You could have a small bridge tournament in this place. So long as no one needed to use the restroom.

I haven't had anything to eat or drink in two days, since Zhune brought me a conciliatory six-pack after one of our leads went unpleasantly south. We got out of that just fine--wouldn't have risked getting drunk afterward otherwise--but there was a hotel room and an argument and sometimes I wish he wouldn't try to make things better. Given his approach. Every hint of sympathy is wrapped around a core of making sure I know who's older and smarter and stronger and faster and just plain _better_ at everything having to do with Theft.

But he couldn't do this so well himself. I know that much. We have the key, the location of the safe, the habits of the people around it, and all we have to do is stop by tomorrow afternoon to open the lock. Leave before anyone notices. I'm jittery because our luck has been bad for most of this job, all stupid little things that we couldn't have done much about on short notice. Maybe I should focus on the fact that we could've spent all night searching that apartment without luck, and didn't. The man with the key walked right into our--well, into Zhune's hands. Hand. That didn't look comfortable.

The book I've stolen contains slick color plates. Close-ups of details on the higher portions of walls and the tops of pillars, where I could show up in person and not see them so well. The chances of my making it over there to see things in person are, I don't know, pretty low anyway. I'm not great with planes. Zhune doesn't like hopping Tethers to get anywhere. I don't like going back to Stygia, he doesn't like moving much closer to certain spheres of influence than he has to... It's just not likely to happen.

But he'd help me rob a private collection (I don't rob libraries, on principle) for another copy of this book if I asked. Seeing as something will inevitably happen to this copy soon. Always does. I'm not supposed to haul things from one car to another.

All the light's coming from down here, so neither sound nor shadow precede my partner. He appears all on his own. With someone slung over his shoulder.

"What," I say, and then stop again when I pull in a few more details. I stand up and leave the damn book on the chair. No, I was right with my first question, and I get around to finishing it. "What the _fuck_."

"Watch what you say," Zhune says, pleasant as all that, and drops the man from the apartment onto the chair I just vacated. "I'm reasonably sure it's a Seraph."

"I thought he was _dead_." I can see already that this is not one of those conversations I'm going to be having in a level voice while looking nonchalant about the matter. "And yet here he is, duct-taped to a chair."

"Not to the chair yet," Zhune responds, pulling out the roll of tape. "Hold it down, would you?"

"We have a job to do. We have deadlines to meet. There is _no good reason_ to bring a spare angel to the party!" I've switched to Helltongue on account of the Seraph issue, which is not making anything here better. "What if he pulls off an invocation on the second try?"

Zhune gives me one of those looks that indicates he's once again disappointed in my failure to meet his standards, but won't hold it against me. Much. Explicitly. He holds the angel down himself, applying the duct tape expertly. This poor bastard's barely conscious, and already has his mouth taped shut and hands taped behind his back. Zhune could break out of that kind of thing trivially. Someone who went down that fast, with Essence spent? Hardly.

"No one who's spent that much Essence is about to invoke anyone," Zhune says, and ruffles my hair. "Especially down here. It's not the sort of place Archangels find congenial."

"What did you even _bring_ him for?"

"A guarantee that he wouldn't track down friends as soon as he woke up," Zhune says. "Or alert them by showing up at his Heart." These are excellent reasons, and not at all why he's brought this damn creature along. "Besides, Leah, I thought you _liked_ Seraphim."

There is no way I'm about to address that claim. "So stuff him back in the trunk and leave him there."

"I hardly want to leave him unsupervised," Zhune says, as if he is the most reasonable person in the world and I'm making bizarre, emotional objections to the process. He steps behind the chair, and rests a hand on the angel's shoulder like he's showing him off. "You're most of the way through that book, and we have hours to go before dawn. You'll be bored and whiny if we sit around in here with nothing to do."

I am not sure if I'm more upset by having this argument in front of a stranger (even if he can't understand us) or by the concept of Zhune keeping us entertained for hours with. No. Let's not think about this. Let's focus on the problem at hand. "If you want to kill him, that's fine. Don't want to kill him, fine. But we are not keeping him in the same room as us."

"Why not?" Zhune grabs a handful of the man's hair, and pulls that head back so that I can look directly at the muzzy panicked eyes of a Seraph who is just beginning to realize how fucking wrong this situation is. (Like he has any idea.) "Do you not like this one? They're not so easy to come by that I can find you a replacement easily. Especially if you won't tell me what's making you so bitchy."

I am three steps away from them, and I would like to be a lot further. Bolting for the stairs would not solve this problem, though it would be embarrassing. "When have I _ever_ liked kidnapping, Zhune? In all the time we've been together?"

"You did just fine with it a few months ago." Zhune is always the voice of reason. "I've told you that you performed well on that whole job." The Seraph jerks under his hand, and gets pulled back against the chair sharply for his trouble. "Are you still not over that hangup?"

"I just don't like it."

"But you'll do it for the job."

"I'll do anything the Boss tells me to. That's only--logical." Damn near anything. Maybe anything. I expect I'll never know until it comes up. "Doesn't mean I'm into that sort of thing in my free time."

"You need to get past that, Leah." Zhune looks down at the angel in the chair thoughtfully. "I don't know where you picked up that quirk, but it'll be a problem eventually. Maybe you just need to work your way past it."

"And you thought _this_ was a good way to do that?"

"When opportunity knocks..." Zhune shrugs carelessly. It's probably meant as a Djinnish gesture, but it reads more Balseraph to me. He's so damn smug when he's sure everything will go his way. "Can you think of a better way to work through your issues?"

It would be a terrible idea to bring the ceiling down on us, however satisfying that move might be. And here I am without any actual explosives. "How about we don't."

Zhune sighs. Nothing dramatic; just the brief, mild exhale that indicates he has once again run into an unreasonable obstacle in the shape of his partner. "Patience is a virtue, but there's such a thing as too much of it."

"You're the Djinn," I say, and wonder distantly if the Seraph can understand Helltongue. Almost certainly not, and even if he could, none of this is any use to him, except maybe to demonstrate that we are having an argument. Which I'm pretty sure he's picked up on by now. "Patience is _your_ gig. I say we leave him here and go do something more productive."

"You're so easily bored," Zhune says. "How about this?" He wraps a hand around the Seraph's throat, and sings out that fucking Song.

There are plenty of Songs that have good and valid uses in all walks of life. I'm especially fond of Form, Ethereal flavor, for letting me skulk about in shadows in a properly Theft manner. Healing, all varieties? That's been my friend. Even the Songs that just _set things on fire_ have their place. But there is no good excuse for Ethereal Attraction. All it does is fuck with someone's head, and aren't there enough resonances to do that already?

Besides, the Song isn't exactly helping anything, because now the Seraph is twitching madly against the duct tape, trying to get to Zhune. Who has wandered across the room to flip on another set of lights. He's making a deliberate point about how little he cares about what he's just done, and--he can be such a _Djinn_ sometimes.

"How does this help?" I ask, in my most calm and reasonable voice. "What about this situation says 'Such fun we're having this evening, gosh, I'd like to do this again' to you?"

Zhune leaves off fiddling with the lights, now that we're surrounded by a white glare. I thought all those other bulbs up there were burnt out, but, no, just on separate switches. Someone must have fun with interrogation down here. (Sometimes I wonder if the difference between the Game and Theft is how much paperwork we have to do between kicking other Words in the knees.) "Do you not like Seraphim anymore?"

"Let's _not_ get started on that again."

He saunters over to the angel, and rips off enough duct tape to allow talking. "Are you having fun yet?" Zhune asks, switching to English for the sake of being a terrible person for no good reason. I mean--it's one thing when we're getting something out of it, but we're not. Except for keeping my partner amused, and I can't say I'm hugely committed to that goal right now.

"No," says the angel. Can't remember what his name is--the name of his Role, I mean--though we had that info at some point. Zhune did most of that legwork while I was busy following a dead-end lead for the key. "Please let me go." He's got his voice almost steady, but he's shivering in that chair. At least he's not pulling at anything right now, since Zhune's right up close with him.

"We could," Zhune says, "but you'd just come back, wouldn't you?"

"For a certain number of hours." The Seraph's voice wobbles, sliding into a higher pitch. "If I understand how that Song works."

"So now we have a Seraph trying to follow you everywhere. Great. This improves the evening enormously." I have no intention of switching to a language the angel can follow. I stalk away towards the stairs, and kick a hole in the wall. (Not serious structural damage, just trying to get enough irritation out of my veins to focus better.) "You can't even turn that off. Do you have any idea how long it'll last?"

"As the Most Holy said." Zhune flips a mocking gesture of deferral towards the Seraph. "A certain number of hours." He rests a hand on the man's shoulder. "As you say, there's no way to turn it off. Are you sure you don't want to participate? Is there something you're afraid of? I wouldn't let him hurt you."

"This isn't exactly about--"

"We could ask him fun questions," Zhune says, condescending as all Hell. As if he had acquired the Word of Condescension when I wasn't looking. "Don't you like interrogations?"

Trust my partner to hold a grudge about something I didn't ask for and didn't want and that happened months ago. It's odd; just thinking about it I can still taste--oh, never mind. "No," I say. "I'm not a fan. We're not doing this."

"Participation isn't required," Zhune says. He considers the Seraph the way he does cars he's about to steal. "Not from everyone in the room."

I stalk up to Zhune's side. "Stop this."

"Stop what?" my partner asks, and ruffles my hair, while the Seraph twitches on the chair. That poor bastard can't reconcile the urges of the Song to possess-find-protect Zhune and his own quite sensible natural impulses to get the hell out of here. Like he'll get a chance to do either at this rate.

"Stop fucking with angels when we're on the job."

"We could stash him for after the job," Zhune says, "though that could be a problem when he starts picking up Essence again. Besides, you'd just bitch about it more." He has to tilt his chin down to look at me when I stand this close. Some people get all the vessel luck, and my short female body is not where the luck is hanging out. "Stop fussing, or come up with a better plan."

I slide a hand inside his jacket. My partner is never unarmed, and I know where to find his guns by now. This one's small enough to not even be an awkward size in my hand. "I gave you a better plan. Why won't you fucking _listen_?"

"I am listening," Zhune says, all patience and serenity in voice and face, while his hand flexes on the angel's shoulder. "I'm not agreeing with you. That's different. Do you even know what do with that thing?"

"This?" I keep the gun pointed towards the floor as I step backwards. "Yeah, I can think of a few things. We're not doing this. _You're_ not doing this. We are on a job."

"Relax," Zhune says, "and don't be such a child about this."

I shoot him in the knees. One after another.

It would be nice to say that I can't believe I'm doing this, but at the moment I'm angry enough I think he's lucky I'm only aiming for the knees.

I turn away while he's staggering backward, and make the chair the Seraph's sitting on stop existing as a single discrete object. The angel hits the ground with a pained squeak, and I get a hand to the collar of his jacket before he's past shock enough to start thinking about flailing towards my partner.

My partner is, I think, still on the floor of that basement while I haul the Seraph upstairs. Not yelling, no, he doesn't _yell_ at me when he's angry, that might actually accomplish something. We can't just have a screaming argument about what happened when we worked with the Gamesters, no, we have to let it sit for months until something's going to snap.

Well, he snapped first, so it's only fair that I get a shot at it.

Ha. Shot.

Fuck it all this is going to end horribly, and we both know it. But he'll be okay. Zhune always gets back on his feet, and if this is what I do that finally gets me killed, at least it'll make an amusing story for someone in a Stygian bar.

I fling the Seraph into the back seat of the car, where there are child safety locks to keep him from wiggling his way to a handle and falling out. "Do you have _anything_ useful to say at this point?" I ask him, while the garage door creeps open. (Disturbance says my partner has applied a quick fix to his knees. Well, at least one of them. It might take more than one try to get all those bones knit back together.)

"Why are you _doing_ this?" the Seraph asks.

I throw the gears into reverse, and back out of the garage so fast that the rising door scraps the paint of the car's roof. "Long fucking story, Most Holy. Do you think you can sit down quietly in the back while I drive?"

There is a short pause from the back seat while I get the car pointed in a useful direction. A good thing too that by now I know to pay attention when driving into one of these twisty residential mazes, even when I'm not at the wheel, or I'd never find my way back out.

"No," the Seraph concludes. There's a thump as he rolls off the seat onto the floor. "This is terrible."

"TRUE." I take a breath, and focus on the driving. "It's just a Song in your head."

"I know! How could I not know? Knowing doesn't help. It's almost worse, because I don't mean to do this, but I can't stop wanting it, and I can't stop trying, and..." His voice trails off into a choked sob. "Please let me out."

"What, so that you can wiggle your way back to that house? You couldn't even find it by now."

That gets me another half-minute of silence before the Seraph asks, "Do you work for Dark Humor?"

"No," I say, "but it would explain a lot about this, wouldn't it?"

"It would."

"If you don't stop flinging yourself against the door, I'm going to lock you in the trunk."

"That might help," the Seraph says.

I have to think about that one for a moment. "Help us both feel better, or help you escape because of the safety release lever they put in trunks these days?"

I get no answer to that, but the silence seems more abashed than before. Between the plaintive, useless thumps at the locked door.

"Right," I say, "you just keep doing that thing, and we're not stopping until we get somewhere useful."


	3. An Interlude, In Which I Avoid Meeting People Who Might Ask Awkward Questions

Rosa was working through a Teach Yourself To Knit book when a knock came on the back door. She shoved the mass of yarn beneath her chair, and checked the security cameras first. The interruption was something of a relief; she still couldn't figure out what was supposed to be going on with purling, and the black-and-white diagrams in the book were less than helpful. Some women would just learn this sort of thing from their grandmother, or mother... But then, some women would also have sensible hobbies, rather than doing night security for a church with a direct connection to Heaven itself. Rosa had given up on the relentless judgment of _some women_ about five years after the name change, and hadn't looked back since.

The security cameras were new, and still a matter of debate in the secondary hierarchy (she didn't really like to think of it as an "inner circle," that sounded too much like a conspiracy) within the church. Father Sebastian insisted that they implied a lack of trust; Sister Dolores considered them a sad commentary on the lack of respect for the Church in the modern day; that enthusiastic new Malakite had gone into detail about the many ways the forces of Hell could be thwarted with judiciously applied modern technology. So far, the only people thwarted by modern technology had been one semi-competent adolescent with a can of spraypaint, and multiple elderly nuns from the school next door, all of them either unable or unwilling to remember how to deal with the security system.

Rosa was somewhat inclined to agree with Father Sebastian, but she did like the ability to check who was at the back door before opening it. That she wasn't a _small_ woman by any standard didn't mean she was entirely comfortable letting in strangers without a little assurance. Being able to miraculously heal injuries was nice, but more of an after-the-fact help than useful in the middle of dealing with intruders.

Tonight's possible intruder was no one Rosa had seen before. Some child--no, a small teenage girl, in battered clothing that could be fashion statement or serious lack of resources. (Rosa could almost hear her father's _in my day_ diatribe from the grave, looking at the holes in the knees of those jeans.) The girl pounded on the door again, and glared up at the camera. Whatever she mouthed at it didn't look particularly happy. Probably it had been a good plan not to install sound pick-ups as well, whatever that Malakite said.

Rosa left the monitors, and walked down the short hallway to the back door itself. She drew back the bolts, and pulled the whole thing open in one swoop so that she could loom over the girl. Not threatening, exactly, just...looming. In case mischief was afoot. Appearances could be deceptive. "What seems to be the problem, young lady?"

The girl glared up at her, hands in fists by her side. "Are you in the know?"

Rosa considered playing dumb. But, no, if this were a demonic assault, it wouldn't come in the form of mildly cryptic questions. "I generally think of myself as such. What do you need?"

"I have a Seraph tied up in my car," the girl said, with a remarkable new level of calm when a statement like that should've brought _less_ calm. It certainly wasn't making Rosa feel any more serene about the evening than before she'd heard it. "His head's fucked over by a Song, and if you untie him he'll try to crawl back into danger, so now he's _your_ problem."

"Wait. How--"

"Never mind that," the girl said testily. "I parked the car back behind that damn wall, since I couldn't get onto the lawn. Your problem now. Go ahead and keep the car, I think it might be his anyway." She pointed towards the stone wall behind the back garden. "Go. Fetch. Whatever you do with stuff like this."

"Now wait just a minute," Rosa said, but the girl was already stalking away through the garden, shoulders hunched and hands in her pockets.

_Hell._ It was okay to think curse words, she felt, and even more so when they might be literal. (The Malakite had a pretty blase attitude about that, too, which she didn't usually expect in Malakim or angels of the Sword, but he claimed that after you'd stabbed a few demons you learned to use "damn" in a much more informed sense.) There was some car parked out there--she could make out the shine of the headlights, knowing what to look for--and no way of telling if it did contain an angel in distress, or a much nastier surprise. Or nothing at all, serving only to distract her... But there were easier ways to move the night watchwoman out of her post, and paranoia served no one.

She jogged off toward the wall, fumbling out her phone to call the Seneschal first. One advantage of working for angels was that they so seldom objected to emergency calls in the middle of the night. "Sister? I think we have a problem, and I need backup."

#

Rosa stood up when the Malakite walked in, though she couldn't have put her finger on why. It seemed like the thing to do when people with serious news arrived, like standing to hear what the doctor said when in the waiting room at the hospital. "Will he be all right?" She did not say _poor baby_ because that wasn't the sort of thing you said about an angel, especially one that appeared to have a perfectly adult vessel (and then some, being older than her by at least a decade in appearance), but it was on the tip of her tongue.

"Probably," Salvador said. He had a wry smile that tugged up the corner of his mouth on one side, and it always looked too perfectly human for her to quite believe he was an angel. He was certainly the least inhuman angel she'd ever met. He pulled a spare chair over and sat down backward on it, so she sat back down beside the monitor. "That poor Seraph." So, there, he'd said it, and she didn't have to. "Eighty years on the corporeal, and I don't think he'd ever met a demon in the whole time."

"But he'll be okay."

"Yes, we're leaving him under surveillance until the Song's definitely worn off. It helps that he's a Seraph; he can just _tell_ us that he still feels it, and we can trust he's not trying to weasel out of anything. Probably Dolores will slip him a few sleeping pills, so that he can stop twitching so much."

Rosa didn't approve of drugging people without their knowledge or consent, but under the circumstances it seemed a lot more honorable than usual. "Who is he? And what happened?"

"Seraph of Creation. Working for Destiny, so he's a sensible Creationer, as these things go. A nice stable Role, no real interaction with other celestials of any sort..." Salvador rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Until an acquaintance asked him to hold onto a key. The idea being, as near as I can follow--because that is one of the least coherent Seraphim I've ever spoken with--that no one would even think to look for it with him. No celestial contact, no trouble with demons... He's not on anyone's radar."

"But something happened anyway," Rosa said.

"Yes, that's...confusing. At this point I want another Seraph down here listening to what this one's saying, to figure things out, but you can't just order one up." Salvador nodded towards the monitors. "Can you run the tape of the drop-off? And tell me what was said? We can check that against other records."

"Sure, I'll pull it up." Rosa rolled her chair over to the computer set beside the monitor; recent video would be trivial to find, compared to something from weeks ago. "Who brought him in, anyway?"

The Malakite was quiet for a moment. "Well," he said at last, "the Seraph thinks it was a Calabite of Fire."

"You're fu--uh, kidding me."

Salvador spread his hands. "I repeat what a Seraph told me. No jokes, Rosie. Let's see who it really is."

"Right. Just a minute." Rosa kicked her knitting under the desk, and started running the feed backward to where the girl had arrived. She'd have found a way to start serving Heaven directly years ago, if she'd known it could lead to nights like this one.


	4. In Which We Define Our Words

I have been walking for twenty minutes, am starting to seriously consider stealing a car, when Zhune pulls up at the curb. He's brought a black SUV last seen parked in the driveway of one of the few houses still inhabited in that complex; while I'd rather continue walking than sit in that, a twenty-minute walk from a Sword Tether is not the place to have an argument about this.

The door lock clicks open, and I get inside.

"Do you want me to drive?"

Zhune looks at me for a moment. If I didn't know better, I'd assume he were checking to make sure I hadn't picked up any new injuries since he last saw me. But if he's paying any attention to his resonance, he knows I'm exactly as healthy as before, and maybe--I don't know. Slightly less irate. Not a whole lot less.

By way of answer, he pulls away from the curb again. My partner's not a bad driver when he's not thinking about it, and right now, he's clearly not thinking about the driving, even if his eyes are more or less on the road. When he pays attention to his driving he over-corrects, or makes careless mistakes just to prove that he doesn't care and it doesn't matter. If he actually didn't care I wouldn't be the one who had to drive us everywhere.

He's waiting for me to apologize. I get my seatbelt on, and stare out the windshield. It feels like the sort of non-conversation that ought to have falling snow, but the skies are clear and bright overhead. If we get outside this city, we might even be able to make out some stars.

Zhune's fingers drum across the wheel of the car. I know the rhythm by heart. I could tap it out in my sleep, if I were the sort of creature who gets to sleep. There is a part of me that is, for a moment, back in a different car, a different city, trying not to talk to my partner about Anthony. Wondering exactly how far the unstated protection of my Djinn would run, when set against a friend he'd known for longer.

"You shot me," Zhune says, in the sort of voice an outside observer would probably identify as calm and reasonable.

"Twice," I say. I keep my hands in my lap where they won't do anything stupid.

"Somehow, this seemed like a good idea to you."

"I guess it did." I'd rather look out the window to my right, but that would be conceding a point.

"Appropriate to the circumstances."

"You were the one who created the circumstances," I say. I would be happier if he'd just yell. Maybe he'd rather I did, too. It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's arguments that way. "You know exactly where these lines are, or you wouldn't make sure I was looking whenever you step over them. How is it that you're still surprised at the results?"

"For some reason," Zhune says, "I don't expect my _partner_ to shoot me. That's usually left to my enemies."

"There are a lot of things I'd rather my partner not do," I say. My knees hurt where my fingers are pressing into them. "But somehow that's never changed how it works. Maybe we just define the word differently."

"Like you've never gone kidnapping before."

"That was a job, Zhune. From our Prince."

"You're fine with doing it for work, and can't stand even seeing it outside of work."

"Yes," I say, though _fine_ is wildly overstating the point. "Much like spending time with the Game, it's not something I seek out on my own time."

"Really."

He's not even asking questions anymore. I consider flinging myself out the door of the car. But that'd distract us both for, oh, maybe thirty seconds. A minute, if I broke something. Not worth the hassle.

"You can't do that again," I say.

"Odd," Zhune says. "I thought that was supposed to be my line."

"I put up with an awful fucking lot, you know, because overall this--works. We get the job done."

"So you'd rather I do that in my free time," Zhune says.

"You damn well know what I mean." I could make this windshield disappear. I could take this car apart, piece by piece. Give me a few minutes at that gas station we're passing and I could take the whole place down. "You want to do that in your free time, keep it out of my sight and I'll never know. Or is it no fun for you at that point?"

"What did you do with the snake, Leah?"

I could probably distract the both of us for a minute or two in arguing over the name he uses for me. There are so many things I could do right now that don't seem worth the effort, for what I'd get out of them in return. "I dropped him off," I say. This may be the moment for some clever lying, and yet I don't think that's the best plan. There are things to lie to my partner about, but--fuck it all, this is back to the realm of work, and I can't start editing the details there. It'd screw us both over. "At a Sword Tether."

Zhune hits the brakes so hard I bounce against the seatbelt. "What."

"I left the Seraph at a Sword Tether. You know the one. Where that whole thing happened with the Cherub." I rub my mouth with the back of my hand. Lying would've been easier. "No one followed me from there. I'm not an amateur."

Zhune curses in Helltongue. It's an archaic form, and it ought to sound ludicrous, but it doesn't. Merely sincere.

"If I just dropped him off on the side of the road," I say, because I think he does deserve an explanation, "you'd have just picked him up again. Or he'd follow me back to get to you."

"You could have killed him," Zhune says. "Perhaps it never occurred to you that among the many people we've killed over the last decade--"

"It's not about the Choir," I say. "It's not about him being an angel. It's about you deciding to fuck with someone's head. Is there any way I can make this more clear? Do you have a whiteboard in the trunk, where you keep all the duct tape?"

"You have just delivered a snake who's seen both of us, who had the key and knows we have it, to the one Word in Heaven that cooperates with all the rest," Zhune says. "How is this professional?"

"Maybe you should have thought about that before _kidnapping that angel_ , Zhune. Did I try to stop you from killing him? Did I object? No. That was work. I don't interfere with work--"

"Leah," Zhune says, "shut up."

I shut up and let him drive.

He gets around to turning the headlights on before we hit anything, so there's that. The running lights aren't the headlights, and--oh, it doesn't matter. Like he ever cares when I try to explain these things. As far as he's concerned the details aren't important if they change in less than twenty years.

We're not going to be together twenty years from now. It can't possibly last that long. Sometimes I'm not sure we're going to last twenty minutes. And by _we_ I generally mean _me_ , because anyone who can move from the Game to Theft and keep running--well. He might keep on running forever. A thousand years from now, he'll be that century's version of James Bond, with a new partner at his side.

He never talks about his other partners. Not a big pointed silence, that would mean more, but they just...don't come up. Not unless one of his friends mentions them.

There's no reason to dwell on this. Like that would help.

#

Zhune drives for most of two hours. Away from where the job is. (If we're still doing the work this afternoon, there's plenty of time to get back. Most of twelve hours. Even so.) When he pulls into the driveway of a bland little house in a neighborhood of young trees and flat lawns, the SUV is missing one side mirror and two patches of paint. I have not broken anything. We haven't been speaking.

I've seen him angrier before. Of course. But not at me.

He turns off the ignition, and gets out of the car without looking at me.

And when I don't follow, he turns around to wait.

"We have work to do," I say, to the open door on the driver's side.

"One stop," Zhune says, "and then we'll be able to fix your fuckup."

He's not letting me in on any of the details. I can't make any sort of decent plans, or adjust the ones we were expecting to use, if he's shutting me out like this. This is an obvious enough point for him to make: how do I like it when he changes plans on me without discussion? Fine. _Fine_. But if I was unprofessional, yes, no real denying it, throwing in more communication problems isn't any sort of way to deal with this.

There is no getting out of him making an issue of this. He could still hold that for after the job is done. He could've dealt with his issues about the whole Game thing between jobs, not _during_ one. During a job we picked up from a Baron, for god's sake, as if it wouldn't have been bad enough during something we were running for one of Zhune's old friends.

I get out of the car and leave the door open. "Can we make this fast?"

Zhune beckons with two fingers. I am inclined to turn right around and get back in the car.

Can't do this job without him. We are, for better or worse, partners. So this is one of those jobs that falls into the worse box. (In sickness or in health, come to think of it, and death hasn't managed to part us yet. Not the kind we can wake up from.) If I walk away, with the key in the pocket, and try to do this job myself... No. I can't. I have limits, whether or not my partner likes it.

"Asshole doesn't look good on you," I say, and slouch along behind him to the front door.

Zhune bothers to knock once before picking the lock. We are, by his standards, being remarkably polite. If I'm lucky, he's doing damage control via some friend with useful contacts. (I am so seldom lucky.) He flicks on light switches as we move through the tedious little house, and we meet its inhabitant in the living room.

"You could call ahead," the woman says wryly. She's tall, middle-aged, no one I can place to a Band by demeanor or vessel or movement in ten seconds of observation. "It's been ages. How have you been?"

"You know how it goes," Zhune says, all smug serenity from face to voice. Maybe she can't read the tension in his back. "You haven't met Leah, have you? My partner."

I am, by now, entirely used to that assessing look from his friends. The up and down that does not say out loud _Is this one any good?_ and _I wonder how long it'll last._ "Nia," she says, offering a hand, which I shake briefly like someone with actual manners. "Always nice to meet one of his partners. How long has it been?"

Oh, that was a little more barbed than his friends usually go for in front of his face. "I haven't really been counting," I say, and stuff my hands back in my pockets as soon as they're both free.

Nia waves briskly toward the kitchen. "If anyone wants a drink, you can help yourself. But I imagine there's an emergency, or you wouldn't be here."

Zhune is in the way of any kitchen retreat I might want to make. A casual adjustment of position that I think fools no one in this room. "I need to call in that loan," he says.

The woman's face sets. Not losing any of its pleasantness, but the attempt to project sincerity has been switched off. "I don't have that much on me, right this minute."

"I would expect you'd have half," Zhune says, calm as ever. "Emergency reserves. Unless you've been getting into trouble? Do you need more help yourself?"

"No, it's been fine," Nia says. "Half I can get you."

Zhune sets a hand to the small of my back, as if I'm trying to back away. Which I'm not. Maybe I should be. "Half will be enough," he says. "Leah fucked up, and we need to fix it."

Nia's mouth twists up at one corner. That's sincere, and I don't like it. "Anyone can make a mistake," she says. "What do you need?"

"She ought to be sorry," Zhune says, "for what she did."

His hand's wrapped in my shirt and I am still hesitating on _what_ and _no_ and--you don't run away from your partner, do you? That's not how it works. It's one thing to walk away after an argument, another to run, and his friend lays a hand on my shoulder.

That must've been, oh, five Essence spent. I can do basic math. He's helped her cover up dissonance once before. What a good friend he is.

It is exactly like I told the Seraph. Or he told me. I don't remember which. Knowing it's not real doesn't help at all.

I am sorry and I am sorry and I am angry and I am _sorry_. On my knees on the carpet, some horrible beige stuff I would set on fire if I had to live with it for days on end, and maybe I could stand up if it were a matter of life or death. It's been that before. It is not now. I am sorry. I was right. It was a stupid decision, and I should not do anything like that to my partner.

What they're saying overhead doesn't matter. (I should not be sorry. I am. Knowing doesn't help.) I am sobbing over this stupid carpet, because I am sorry for, oh, not everything, not the things I should crawl back to people and apologize for, but only for _this_. What I did to my partner. Fucking up the job for my own stupid--I don't even know what they are. Cracks in my soul that I can't even resonate through the way I do with Discord. I used to have a Discord that broke me, that tied my hands behind my back, and that was an excuse, but this I had no excuse for.

I don't know why I do these things. I'm sorry. I hate being sorry. I hate the ache in my eyes and the scratch in my throat. I hate the steady roar of _all my fault_ that's soaked through me from skin to bones.

I am sorry and he's _not_ , or he'd be down here with me. He caught me once, you know? I was falling, and he caught me. It's the sort of thing a person could believe meant something. And oh I wish I'd just shot that damn angel, so that we could have all our fighting outside of the job, and I am sorry and angry and still on this floor. I'll run out of tears, soon. There's only so much of that in my body to get shaken out by this fucking Habbalite.

They're still talking. I am not listening. I refuse to care what they're talking about. Steady breaths, like I told a panicking kid once. It's not that it helps the pain be any less. But it makes you feel like you're doing something about it.

And resonance that punches that hard wears off pretty fast. Lucky me.

I'm all out of sorry. And all out of angry. I'd like to have the anger back. It's like the steady breathing. Gives me something to focus on. But I'm not angry. It just...hurts.

That's the point, isn't it? He didn't think I'd shoot him. I didn't think he'd do this to me. Lesson learned. Everyone's unhappy. We have all learned a valuable new lesson about each other's boundaries. If I don't do what made him unhappy--

There is absolutely no guarantee that he won't do this again.

I mean, how does that even work? I never disagree with him, never do what he wouldn't like, and he won't do this. He knows, he _knows_ about me and Habbalah, about Althea and that Game Habbie and he always knows how to make it hurt. He can hold this over me forever.

I cannot be perfectly what he wants. Not for very long. Things would explode. Probably on top of us.

Zhune gathers me up from the floor, a hand to my shoulder. Possibly I should be grateful he's willing to touch me again. There's a stop in the bathroom to get my face washed, my hair trimmed. Like any of this matters. Why am I supposed to care what I look like? If we do the job right, no one sees me. (We're not doing the job right, and that is my fault. I don't need the resonance to tell me that.) Out in the same car again. Back towards the job.

I'm just as glad that he's driving. I would hit things.

"We have to work on the assumption that they know we're coming," Zhune says. "Descriptions. That we have the key."

This is where I am supposed to explain how we'll pull this off.

"You can't do this," I say. I can feel his gaze move to me, and I am not looking at him. If I look at him--maybe I'll be angry. That would be better than this. But maybe I'll be _sorry_ again, and I can't take that.

"That could use a little clarity, Leah."

"What you did. You can't do that. You can't do that to me."

He reaches over to nudge me in the shoulder. "Try to focus on the job."

"Just tell me," I say, "that you won't do that again. Do you want a promise that I won't shoot you again? Because that can be arranged."

"If you don't do anything stupid," Zhune says, all gentle patience, "you have nothing to worry about. Done is done. Now. Don't you think we should focus on the work ahead?"

So. Fine. I'll come up with a way to make this work. Just as well that I'm not angry. I can't afford the distraction right now.

I am not sorry, whether I should be or not.


	5. In Which Everything Goes To Hell

Never mind about the plan. It got me as far as the vault, which was trivial, and the safe, which was not, unless you have the key, which I do. Did. It snapped into place to open the door, and after that point I didn't care if it came out or not. (There's often a trick to these things. One little extra fuck you from the artifact creator, against anyone using their tools without reading the instruction manual. Not my problem. Don't care.) There are times when I would go on about the building (solid, more marble than is strictly necessary, glorious high ceilings and arches like you almost never get in private buildings in this country) or the security (mostly Zhune's problem, aside from a few careful placements of resonance) or any of those details. But they don't particularly matter.

What matters is that I lay my hands on our actual target, and everything goes to hell.

It is not, in the immediate sense, my fault. I've already dealt with every bit of security left inside this vault. It's a stupidly large basement room, cluttered with antiques of values I don't know. (Furniture was never my area of interest.) The safe's about what you'd expect from an artifact; heavy, clunky, looking just a little off from what an ordinary one would be. Once open, it holds cash, jewelry I don't care about, papers I still don't care about--that Baron is not paying us enough to grab secondary targets, and we still don't know enough about who owns this place to do risk/reward on taking anything else--and a wooden box. About the size of the key, really.

I grab the box, and pop open the lid, to make sure I have the right thing. Inside, in foam and velvet, lies a vial of pink-tinged liquid. Bloody tears, according to what we were told, and the vial does look like you could draw blood into it.

The vault door, which I left quiet and closed, slams open. A crash on the stairs, and a wet thud, followed by a shock of disturbance. Not someone dying, not damage--fuck. Song. Not one I recognize right off, so that means it's not coming from my partner, unless he has more tricks up his sleeve than he's let on so far.

Essence reserves and risk and distance say that blowing all my Essence on trying to sing my way a hundred yards away would be a bad plan. Too hard to figure out where I'd land, and there's a lot of area around this building I do _not_ want to drop into Essence-low and unprepared for my surroundings. So it's a much smaller Essence investment to sing myself near invisible, and hope whoever comes through the door next will be looking at the safe. Not at me edging my way toward the door.

The door slams open, a bloody-handed woman with a sword trying to catch her footing again as she staggers backward. Immediately following: my partner, who's not even supposed to be inside the building. Fuck. Something has gone vastly wrong, and I don't have any way to get the details from him right now.

(I should've taught him Celestial Tongues, since I know it myself. But that would require him to admit I know something he doesn't, that he'd actually want to know.)

Safest thing to do would be to let them clear the doorway, then bolt. _I_ can call my partner to catch up with me once I'm out. If I can get out on my own. If he can get out on his own. I don't like any part of this plan. But if Zhune can take this woman down--well, he's bleeding, but he's not bleeding _much_. That suit is going to be a complete loss regardless.

I am still doing this edging towards the door, made of indecision, when someone new lunges into the vault. Blood and sword, what is _with_ some people and archaic weapons, and they have my partner cornered between them, because he got himself trapped down here with no good way out. Though he's doing just fine against them so far; the new man's handling his sword awkwardly, having swapped it away from the other side where he's missing a hand. No wonder he was delayed in joining into this fight.

It is my job to get out of here with what we've been sent in to steal. That's the professional choice.

Maybe that's the kind of choice I make. Run for the door, leave Zhune to take the both of them--he probably can--and get the job done myself. Someone more professional than I am would be out the door already, while there's a gap, instead of hesitating like this.

The woman with the sword catches sight of me, and so much for making decisions. (That's the problem with taking too long on making a decision: eventually circumstances will do it for you.) She whips away from Zhune, stalking the half-visible shadow that I am right now. No words on this one. I suppose we're past the point of talking this out.

I remind the Symphony that everything breaks, especially things near Calabim, and her sword...corrodes. Not what I meant, but it must be an artifact, because that would have reduced it to shards and dust otherwise.

I am poised for a thrust with that sword, if it's so impolite as to remain in one piece, and not at all prepared for her to leap on me directly. We hit the ground--I hit the ground, barely miss slamming my head against the wall, with her on top of me, and that box is still in my hand, lid unlatched.

A better Thief would've held onto it.

The vial smashes on the floor. Could not have broken it more effectively if I tried. The liquid inside doesn't spread out, but evaporates, a cloud of intense scent boiling up through the room like it was under high pressure and only now released back to its natural state.

I don't know how to describe the smell. I don't think any of us could. It hits me somewhere in the brain, in parts of this vessel that shouldn't even hook into memory. Cities in a cold mist, enormous trees, something bright silver slipping downstream, I don't _know_. It was an artifact. It's gone now. It meant something to other people in a way I can't even understand. There's no sight or sound that I can pay attention to when that cloud is around me.

Zhune grabs me by my collar, and drags me out of there.

A few meters outside the room, I can hear one of those angels crying. But I can't see anything, can't walk straight, until we're up the stairs.

Getting out was a mess. I don't want to talk about it.

#

"Well," Zhune says. We both smell like blood, even if none of it is mine. We've switched cars twice. I am flat out of Essence, and Zhune must be nearly so, but at least no one is bleeding on anything right this minute.

I'm letting Zhune have the driver's seat, which is terrible. That's what we've come to. I would rather let him drive than deal with trying to not hit things right now. I can't stand to get my hands too close to my face, or I start to smell that artifact again.

"Could've gone better," I say. It's a pity we're parked for the moment, in the shade of oaks at the back of a diner's parking lot. There'd be more scenery to distract me if we were still moving.

"It's one thing," Zhune says, careful and precise, "to perform a job messily. Another to fail at it. This is the first time in a while that I've seen a job turn so bad that the target's destroyed in the process."

From what certain demons told me back in Seattle, it's been less than a century since he's done exactly that. Or had a partner do it. Probably not the time to bring that up. "How upset is the Baron going to be? We have plenty of angels to blame this on."

"You have no idea," Zhune says.

"Which is why I'm _asking_. Were you under the impression I was making light chit-chat about our erstwhile employer's feelings about the situation? Is this 'we don't get paid' level of annoyance or 'it would be a great time to spend a few months in Canada' levels?"

"Canada won't save you." My partner shifts about in the driver's seat to face me directly, though I'm not much for facing him right now. "You have well and truly fucked this one over. Being inconveniently located will not stop the Baron from showing up and discussing the matter."

"It was the kind of accident that could happen to anyone, on a job."

"It was the kind of accident that shouldn't have happened to us. Would you like to go over the steps that led it, or should I let you come up with them yourself?"

He does not have to rub it in. He is entirely justified in doing so. "I need a shower. Though not half as badly as you do."

Zhune reaches out and grabs my chin. Turns my face toward him. "Leah. You are in trouble. Try to pay attention."

"So let's try to _fix_ it. Do you have any good apology gifts in one of your caches?"

"The last time we had possession of an artifact that closely associated with the Archangel of Water," Zhune says, "you tried to give it away to the angels."

"Yes, but they didn't take it." As the Boss did, it still doesn't help. I would like to curl up somewhere cool and dark for a while. Maybe under a desk. With a six-pack of beer and no one bothering me for, oh, hours. _Days_. What a concept. Being all by myself for days. "So that's a no."

He does not let go of my face. No choice but eye contact, here. "You've destroyed an irreplaceable unique artifact. Even if we say nothing about what you did to get us jumped, there's no covering up the artifact's loss. That Baron will be very angry, Leah, and I can only protect you so far."

And I'm the one who needs protecting, because everyone knows that Zhune is one of the Boss's favorites, and I...am merely his partner. One of many in a long series. Quite replaceable, unlike what I dropped.

"So tell me what to expect."

"You remember Shal-Mari," Zhune says. His hand lifts to brush through my hair. "A few days of that, I suppose. Not more than three. He's a conscientious sort of man. You might not even lose the vessel. It's not as if you stole from him directly, so he has no good reason to take away what's yours or mine."

I remember Shal-Mari better than I would like to. It had a distinct taste, all other sensation aside. I think--no, I am sure that I would prefer Trauma, which has its own hazards and fucks with my head, but it's quiet and still and doesn't hurt. And Zhune's always there when I wake up again.

He wouldn't just hand me over. But he's telling me he won't fight for me on this one, either. Picking his battles. So long as he gets me back, why shouldn't he let this sort of thing happen to me? Maybe I'll mind better when I see what happens if I don't listen to him.

He pets my hair, and says, "I had a backup plan. That Baron appreciates Seraphim almost as much as you do, and we could've traded one of those in, with enough of an apology. But you had to go break that too."

I do have that theme going. It comes with the Band. And I do not believe for one minute that Zhune had that backup plan in mind when he decided to stuff a Seraph in the trunk of our car. "Too bad," I say. There has to be a way out of this. Once upon a time I could think about the knives and fire and just--cope, but I have lost that ability. Some sort of weakening that comes with staying so long on the corporeal that I begin to look at the world in the same way humans do.

Zhune presses a hand down to hold mine across my knee. "You're shaking."

"Am not."

"Leah--"

"Would you stop _calling_ me that?"

"Leah," he says, patient in a way only he has ever been with me, "this is no time to panic. We can still fix this."

"I'm all out of plans." Maybe I could come up with one if I were thinking straight. I left most of my thinking straight on the floor of that Habbalite's living room, and I don't know when I can get it back. I am shivering, and it's stupid, because this Baron isn't a Habbalite and doesn't know me and what's a bit of physical pain, anyway? Nothing I haven't been through before, time and again and again.

"You don't need to come up with every plan yourself." His hands on mine, fingers curling around my fingers, like we're in this together. "We'll find another snake to give him. We have most of a day left before it's a problem."

"None handy." I don't like stealing people. Don't even have a good reason for it, but I don't like it, and I don't think I can walk into what's waiting for me, either. It's like every Force of me wants to lash out at the problem and--there's no problem that I can fix by making it break. Only ones I can make worse by breaking the wrong things. (An artifact. My partner. Promises, maybe.)

Zhune rests his forehead against mine. He's half out of his seat, to be this close to me. "You could find one," he says. "It's a simple as making the call."

It would be nice if it took me a moment to figure that one out. But no. It's exactly the sort of thing he'd think of. "I couldn't."

"You could. Ask him for help, and he'll come running."

"I _couldn't_. I mean. He's a Seraph. That's the definition of knowing it's a trap." I could not. I would not.

"You can. You tell him the truth. 'Penny, I need help. Terrible things will happen to me if you don't come save me. I'll be waiting for you right here.' Every word of it true. Do you really think he won't come for that?" Zhune pulls away from me, just far enough that I have to look at him again. A hand in my hair is trying to tell me everything will be fine, and it's lying. "Afterward, you can always tell him that I made you do it. It's true enough all over again, because I don't want the Baron to break you. Don't you think the Seraph would forgive you? Angels do that sort of thing."

"I can't."

He offers me a phone. "Tell him you'll meet him right here. Midnight, when the parking lot is clear."

"I don't even know if I remember his number. Or how often he checks messages."

"Call," Zhune says. "Unless you'd really rather take this all on yourself? I can't help you if you won't let me."

I take the phone. I know a half dozen numbers for various angels, which is some sort of hilarious, though it doesn't seem very funny right now. I'm not particularly fond of some of them. But Penny's the only Seraph.

And my partner is not about to let us go anywhere else until I make a call.


	6. An Interlude, In Which A Message Is Misdelivered

Sean was on a training field getting the snot beat out of him by a Malakite ten times his age when the message arrived. It would've been nice to blame that last throw that left him breathless on the ground as distraction from the reliever on the sidelines, waving a hand frantically at him, but, no. It was a fair win. A Warrior who couldn't win through a few distractions just plain couldn't win.

"Best three out of five?" the Virtue asked, offering him a hand up.

"Thanks, but no." Sean brushed himself off, and flashed a smile back at her once he was on his feet. "Something urgent looks to be coming up." And what excellent timing, before he could fall down three times in a row in front of a small crowd of friendly observers. "Catch you around later?"

"Maybe, if it's before Tuesday. I'm heading deep cover for a few years." She tossed off something like a salute--War wasn't as big on formalities as the Sword, but his distinction still counted as rank--and strolled off towards the crowd to see about other takers for some practice. And she'd probably find them; no one in the Groves was shy of taking a few falls for the sake of experience.

The reliever jittered in place at the border of the practice ring. "Message for you, sir!"

Sean accepted the crystal. "What's this from?"

"Corporeal message box. You asked for anything new to be forwarded to you immediately. I came right up from the San Diego Tether."

"--right," Sean said, " _that_ message box." Or answering machine, or whatever the humans were calling the things these days now that they weren't machines, but some...service? In the cloud? He left the details to the nerds at Lightning, and bless them all for finding a way to automate the transfer of computer data into artifacts that could be flung easily up into Heaven. "Stick around a minute, unless you have other urgent duties."

"Not at all, sir! I'm available for any orders!" The reliever saluted much more sharply than the Malakite had, and swooped a polite distance away while Sean held the crystal up to his ear and tapped it on.

And once he'd listened to the message, he ran through it again to be sure. He knew the voice. Oh, that could be faked well enough, but with a declaration of identity right at the beginning... "I need you to find me a Seraph," he told the reliever. And, on second thought, "A specific one. Find out if he's in, and if so, tell him I'm on the way. Otherwise, come back and tell me he's not around."

When the reliever was sent on, he went looking for Riccarda. Like hell was he going to rely entirely on the information an unfriendly Seraph could give him. But he did owe Penny some information, damn old promises, if he wanted any cooperation in the future. That was how Trade worked; always looking ahead to what they'd get out of an arrangement.

He generally did the same. It was just good policy. But so was keeping allies reasonably happy, or at least unhappy with someone _else_.

#

"It's true on a surface level," Riccarda said, a shrug rippling through her. "If there's any part that's particularly untrue, it's where she's addressing the message to that other Seraph. Do you really think she misdialed?"

"No," Sean said, turning the crystal between his fingers. "That's what makes it so strange. That damn Calabite is twisty at the best of times, and liable to take stupid risks for revenge, but she's not stupid. Even if she had someone sitting right next to her while she called--why make a call like that? And what does she expect to get out of _me_?"

"I see the Truth," Riccarda said, "not read minds. Beats me." She extended a wing towards the flap of his tent. "And you have a visitor."

Sean left his seat on a coil of Seraph to pull the flap open. "I see you found him."

"I asked him to wait," the reliever said, wings quivering, "but he said that since you truly weren't actually on your way--"

"No, it's fine. Thanks for bringing him by. You've been a great help." True, which was always a necessity when speaking his native language, but also a way to help indignant relievers calm down and leave with their expected cheer. Unhappy relievers were like leisurely Ofanim: a reason to worry. "You might as well come in."

No one else could glare like Seraphim could. It wasn't even about the number of eyes, because Kyriotates couldn't pull that off. Some combination of eyes, height, and nearest access to the ineffable parts of the Symphony. 

As Sean had never been particularly interested in the parts of the Symphony that couldn't be effed--the remaining bits having plenty of opportunity to eff up everyone else, if not dealt with--he accepted Penny's glare with a bright smile. "I thought you might be interested in this," he said, and held out the crystal.

Riccarda waved a wing vaguely in Penny's direction. "You're the one it's not sent to, then? Maybe you can make sense of it. Nice to meet you, my name's Riccarda, and don't get all in a fluff, Trader. There's hours yet before the time she wants to meet. Or possibly doesn't want to meet; it's so hard to get nuance on a recording."

The Trade Seraph took the crystal with his tail-tip, and ran through it, eyes narrowing down to slits by the end. "When did you get this?"

"About half an hour ago?" Sean shrugged. "The time stamp on it's not more than an hour before that. Like she said, there's no rush. If you could--"

"Hush," Penny said, and held up a wing.

Sean was not particularly accustomed to being hushed in his own tent, even with a number of Seraph acquaintances. But he rolled his eyes and held his tongue for a moment. More interesting was the disturbance of Penny throwing several Essence into something--resonance use, or Sean would find a hat to eat--before playing the message through again.

"Oh," Riccarda said, coiling nearer, "I suppose I could've tried _that_ , but it isn't usually worth it on things that are mostly true. Why did she send it to the wrong person?"

"Because someone was forcing him to send it to me, and he didn't want me to come," Penny said, "obviously." He sniffed in that particularly Seraphic way that always set Sean's pinions on edge. "My thanks for bringing this to my attention. Eventually." On which note he coiled himself right about toward the exit.

"Wait a minute," Sean said, leaping back to his feet, and just when he'd finally settled down again. "You don't want to talk about this any further? You're the one who's been so uptight about that Destroyer--"

"I need to work out what Tether to take down," Penny said. "If you would excuse me."

"It's a trap," Riccarda said, sounding far too amused for any of this. "I'd think you would have noticed."

"Of course it's a trap," Penny said. "Why do you think he sent it to _him_?"

"What, like I'd walk into one, when it's not even addressed to me?" Sean got in some eye-rolling of his own. "I'm not that stupid, and he...ah. Should know it. Huh." He rubbed the back of his neck, and let his wings flex as they liked. "I'm not his emergency backup attack angel, either. And if you know it's a trap, why are you going toward it?"

"He was telling the truth," Penny said. "He is in a great deal of trouble, and my arrival could get him out of it."

"Yes, by getting you killed," Sean said, none too gently. "Or worse. There's _scope_ for worse, let me tell you--"

"I don't intend to go alone," Penny said.

"And you're going to take _who_? Another Trader? Maybe you can negotiate your way out of the trap, that'll go well."

"Sarcasm aside, Intercessionist, I do have some resources available for this purpose." Penny snapped the tent flap open with the tip of his tail, and swept out as imperiously as only a Seraph could.

Sean cursed, and followed that damn Trader. He could hear Riccarda laughing at his back on the way.


	7. In Which I Still Don't Know Where He Finds These Things

"No gun this time," I say to my partner, as he examines the contents of the case.

"Do you think it's easy to find a tranquilizer gun on a few hours of notice?" He holds up a cartridge that looks nothing at all like the vial I broke hours upon hours ago. Half an hour to midnight, and we're back in the same damn parking lot. Even the staff's gone home by now; this is not the sort of place that serves pancakes to drunks at two in the morning.

"How should I know? Maybe you keep them stashed in the same space as all of your freshly dry-cleaned suits and polished shoes." I can't even remember what the contents of that vial smelled like, which is something. I do not like the clothing I'm wearing. Not unlike what I was wearing earlier today, but he insisted we go through a mall, and it's all new. Sharp at the edges. Nothing like me. I am a ragged mess right now, and I can hear my Discord rattle, like putting a seashell to my ear and listening to my own blood. I am entropy in cheap sneakers and a purple hoodie.

"Don't be childish," he says. "All you have to do is sit on the trunk of the car and look woeful. Do you think you can manage that?"

"I don't like this plan."

"You only dislike it because it's not one you made." He ruffles my hair, and I can no longer tell if there's any affection to this gesture, faked or otherwise. "Yes or no, Leah?"

I drag my fingernails along the fabric over my knees. Give me a few minutes, and I'll have holes there, even without applying my resonance. "I can be sad on cue."

"Good girl."


	8. An Interlude, In Which Many Things Happen Without Me

Penny did not think a Mercurian ought to be so testy about other people's plans, especially when said Mercurian was already demanding to join in on a project that had little to do with him. He refrained from saying so particularly often; that would have been a distraction from the plan itself.

The plan, such as it was.

"If we had taken the Sword Tether," said the Mercurian whose true name was not Sean, but who might as well be referred to by that as he used it so often it had become a reasonably true nickname on its own, "we might've picked up more help, and we'd get there an hour earlier beside."

"If we had taken the Sword Tether," Penny said, "what would you have said to the Seneschal?" He studied the map as the car zipped onward, the pulsing dot that indicated their place on it, instead of watching the Mercurian who was driving. It was, perhaps, a gap in his skill set, that he'd had so little reason to learn body language. The Symphony was much better at providing the meaning behind words. (So long as the words were there to carry anything with them.) To the same extent, he did not entirely trust his own expressions and body language to the close attention of the human-nearest Choir of those still in Heaven.

"Most Holy," Sean said, "are you implying that you'd rather keep this whole project a secret from the Sword?"

"Am I?" Penny dropped his phone into his lap, where the Hive laid a spotted paw over it to keep it secure against any sudden stops or turns. The Hive itself (currently an it, with their other selves merely in potentia, all its Forces waiting for investment while one or two were held in this host) was still busy grooming down its ragged fur. At least time wasn't so pressing that they hadn't been able to take a five minute detour into a bathroom near that Wind Tether to remove fleas from the host. A Servitor of Animals might quibble about destroying so many insects to preserve the comfort of the mammal, but fortunately no such angels were in the car.

"How I end up with the one Seraph who decides he needs to keep secrets from the Sword--"

"You work for War," Penny said. "Surely you're used to the concept."

"Speaking of concepts I'm familiar with as a Warrior," Sean said brightly, "here's one: _backup_."

"I'm not bringing anyone I don't know and trust to this meeting." Penny scratched the Hive under its chin. "Except for you."

"Belabor the point, why don't you." The Mercurian waited a minute or so for a response to that, and then continued in the silence as if he'd never paused. "I'm doing this out of the sheer goodness of my heart, you know."

"That's a lie. If it were true, it would still be nothing more than what's expected of an angel."

"The sheer goodness of my heart," Sean said, "plus a few other motivations, and the general feeling that if I'd let you walk out of there to do this on your own, someone would find a way to blame me for the part where you inevitably walk into a trap and horrible things happen to you. Which is _still_ a possibility, given it's the three of us, and I'm the only one here I know can throw a punch. Unless the Kyrio there is going to claw them to death?"

"The Hive is only here to provide surveillance and communications support. Certainly not to offer violence with any host."

"Great," Sean said. "Communications is being handled by someone who doesn't speak any living human languages. Do you have any other revelations to make, before we get there?"

"No," Penny said. "I rather expected the remaining surprises of this trip would come from the demons, unless you had any planned."

"I _might_ ," Sean muttered. He was lying.

#

The meeting place was not the sort Leo would have chosen. That would have been a clue, almost a reveal of the deception, if the words themselves hadn't been laced through with obvious lies. (There were long discussions about the metaphors most appropriate for discussing perception of the Symphony, when the clear and exact language of Heaven wasn't available for discussing them. Penny found that he liked the visual and aural ones equally for practical purposes, but preferred the visual when trying to explain the matter to anyone else.) Leo liked public spaces in emergencies, private ones when he had time to plan. This was clearly an emergency; there should have been crowds to vanish into, mortal authorities to make an inconvenience to anyone wanting to be subtle.

The parking lot was unlit, and deserted but for one car at the far end where foliage pressed against the links of a fence. The map claimed that a stream ran a few meters beyond the fence, greenbelt giving way to actual park, and there was no great chance of stray witnesses appearing from that direction. Even less so from the other, where a blocky diner sat between the lot and the highway.

He had let Sean out of the car a block away. Posit a third person to the demons' side of things, watching from that direction, and there'd be trouble. They were not equipped to handle any large or complex resistance. As Sean kept pointing out, they were barely equipped to handle the very specific resistance known to be ahead. There could be any manner of terrible surprises waiting.

Even so. The truth was that one peculiar, conflicted Calabite had done his best to keep one determined, conflicted Seraph out of this mess, and failed. The setup implied a particular agent, and one who seemed most fond of working alone.

It was easier to walk into danger on the orders of someone above him in the hierarchy--older, wiser, more skilled, maybe simply better informed--than to walk himself and two others in and believe he had made the right choice.

No. That wasn't quite right. He already _believed_ that he had made the right choice. He simply didn't feel that way. Fear had its own language, and it didn't know anything of truth or lies. It was--opinion. Deeper than that, the emotional color that opinion gave shape and meaning to. An Elohite would be able to understand and explain it better.

He had once tried to explain to an exceptionally drunk Calabite why it was that Elohim were careful with their reactions to emotions, and how it wasn't the same as being emotionless. They saw such things clearly, and so of course they couldn't trifle with the results, any more than a Seraph, having seen the truth, could warp it into something else. These things were difficult to explain in human languages, and he didn't think Leo had been particularly convinced.

Penny stopped the car in a parking space three away from the existing car, and turned off the engine. Chasing his own thoughts around in a circle wouldn't help anything, including himself.

He turned to the Hive's host, and asked, as best he could in the nuance-stripped form of angelic available to angels on the corporeal--humming, really--if there had been any trouble locating a suitable host outside, and if matters were reasonably, well, surveilled. Thank God that even in humming one could express simple prepositions and pronouns easily enough.

It turned out that the cat's body language was enough to convey both that the area was now under surveillance, and the Kyriotate maintained doubts about this whole approach.

Penny got out of the car. He left the door standing open, space for a ragged black shadow to slip out unobserved if the situation called for that. The midnight air hit his breath warm and damp.

All told, he rather preferred a building with climate controls and bright lights. A security system. The hum of a Tether nearby. Among the many things he might wish for, while he stood with no cover at the edge of a flat space.

A gunshot cracked through the night. Nothing hit him. Something he could not identify snapped among the brush and trees past the fence.

He felt suddenly ridiculous, standing there and pretending he didn't know this was a trap. (There was a gun inside his jacket, and he didn't expect to use it. That was for situations when he had more information and the upper hand, not strange brawls in the night.) He crossed to the other car with a few brisk steps.

It was unlocked, though without keys in sight. An sedan without anything of note inside. Humans left evidence of their passage; receipts, cups, bags, the little conveniences for passing through the modern economy and culture strewn about them. This car might have departed a dealer's lot ten minutes ago, to be parked here as bait.

But that was a lot of trouble for two Thieves to bother with, when they could simply steal a car. Steal one, strip it down of identifying marks, and...continue using it? What sorts of vehicles _did_ that Djinn prefer to keep?

Not the sort to set bombs on. The appointment was the trap; the vehicle was there for use. Penny opened the driver's side door, and checked the usual places for keys. No such luck. The glovebox was impossibly, perfectly empty.

Two more gunshots. From two different weapons, he was sure of that, though not if either had been the same as the first. They were too loud for him to determine if the fight, such as it was, might be drawing nearer or further away. And no winged creature had dropped to his shoulder to give warning.

He pulled the latch to open the trunk, and walked to the back of the car to check that, as if there were nothing to be afraid of.

The trunk was occupied. By a body, that much he could distinguish in the trickle of light from the highway, though no more details came through than a pale face and dark hair. Never mind _traps_ and the possibilities thereof, he reached into the trunk.

She was still breathing. So he could start breathing again.

He pulled her out, awkward at the motion that was nothing he was used to. (Friends helped friends move bodies. Untrustworthy allies, it seemed, provided covering fire while people not their friends moved the merely unconscious.) Noise came from the brush behind the fence at irregular intervals, and nothing he could clearly identify beyond the three shots. No one having their disagreement over there cared to move the quarrel into words.

"It would be courteous," he said to the cat that blinked at him from inside the other car, "to tell the Mercurian we're about to leave." He said something approximating that, in any case, because _courteous_ was actually quite easy to hum. And he took a moment to be grateful that the Wind Seneschal who'd offered him aid had loaned him a car with back doors.

When he had the Calabite buckled into the back seat, he settled into the driver's seat himself. Key in the ignition. "Is he coming?"

The Hive flicked an ear.

"In that case," Penny said, "see if you can let him know to call if he needs a ride later." That seemed fair. No explicit agreements had been made on this point, but it would be...impolite, at the least, to abandon the Mercurian entirely.

He had only pulled up to the side of the highway when a shape came scratching at the window. An owl, and thus another part of the Hive, that perched on the glass when he rolled the window part way down. So that was a request to stop, which he was willing to listen to. Some allies could be relied on not to let him be caught unaware by enemies.

Instead, Sean caught up with the car, and flung himself into the passenger seat. "What the fuck are--"

"Leaving," Penny said, though the sharp acceleration onto the highway also conveyed this concept perfectly well. "Is this a problem?"

"I'd _rather_ hunt that bastard down, but he broke contact for long enough that I'm not exactly retreating, here. I didn't think you'd just peel out, though. Don't we--"

Sean stopped, and turned to look in the back seat.

"You found her."

"Yes."

"...and shoved her in the car and drove way."

"Yes."

"Was she like this when you got there?"

"Yes."

"Huh." Sean scrubbed bloody hands across his face. Someone would have to clean the car before it could be passed back to the Windies, as even they had standards. "Fuck."

Penny considered that for a moment. "Yes," he said, and drove on.


	9. An Aside To The Audience

I'm told that angels spend a lot of time arguing about free will. Not "what do we do with it" but "does it exist given God's ineffable omnipotence", or something like that. This is generally used as a demonstration of how angels don't get reality, when demons bring it up. It's the equivalent of noting the hilariously quaint and impractical custom of some cultural enemy.

In Hell, we don't argue about this. (Maybe over in Fate, but they're weird there, so never mind that many exceptions proving the rule.) Of course we have free will. The entire rebellion is--we like to claim--predicated on this, on the importance of our choices and our right to make them. So we have free will. We're free to do what we like to each other, and they're free to resist, insofar as they're able after we've gotten our first shots in.

I've broken your kneecaps. You're now free to run as far away from me as you'd like, as fast as you'd prefer. Go on. I'll count to five before I follow.

What I'm saying is not that free will isn't relevant. I'm saying that there's no such thing as _free_. It's like the perfectly spherical frictionless cow of that joke about physicists. (I'm an engineer. We try to remember that cows have hooves.) Every action we take is informed and constrained and pushed and colored and bent by every single other action taken before and around us. I am a product of my past, my culture, my Force composition, and every teacher I've ever had. When I make a choice, stalwart individual that I presumably am, all of those things--and those people--are part of the decision.

So am I actually making decisions at all? Or am I the produce of a thousand million previous influences? You don't need predestination or omnipotent deities to make a guy wonder about these things.

When I made that call, I had more than one choice available to me. In theory. Most of those were choices I was never going to make, because I am not the sort of person who would make them. Is there a version of my life where I'd shoot my partner in the face, and walk away? If so, it's not about my life. That's not the person I am. And I'd like to think that there's no version of my life where I called Penny directly, but let's be honest, here. Maybe I could've. Would've. Might've. Maybe I could have done that and still have been myself.

But that's not what I did.

If I'm not responsible for my own choices, I'm not responsible for the results of those choices. If everything I do is a product of my environment, then everything I cause is the responsibility of that abstract concept. Not mine.

Well. I choose to believe in free will. I choose to believe that I make my own choices, even if it's only in deciding that I'm the sort of person who makes those sorts of choices. And I choose to take responsibility for the outcomes of my actions.

Maybe it doesn't matter to anyone else. But I've decided I'm the sort of person where it matters to me.


	10. An Interlude, In Which Violence Ensues

Sean gave himself ten minutes of breathing space. He was sore, angry, and--well, no longer bleeding, so that was a plus, even if he'd taken a certain grim satisfaction in bloodying the Seraph's car. This wasn't even an _assignment_. This was personal work, a sort of favor done for the sake of principle and good relations between Words, and usually that kind of thing didn't cause this much pain.

A favor, and a chance to shoot at that fucking Djinn. So there were some upsides to the night already.

The Seraph's choice of "a safe place" had turned out to be not a Trade Tether, not a Wind Tether, hell, not even a _Flowers_ Tether, which would've been awkward but some kind of relief, but a lake house with a high stone wall far more decorative than defensible. Sean would have run out of fingers, counting off the ways enemies could approach the house. (And he was already in spitting distance of being down a few of those--fingers, that was--though _broken_ wasn't quite the same as _missing_.) It was a terrible place to stop.

But damned if he didn't need a few minutes to catch his temper and come up with some sort of argument that would convince an impossibly stubborn Seraph of Trade, who was busy demonstrating why the epithet was Most Holy and not Most Strategic or Most Practical. So he grabbed a replacement shirt from a dresser, and took over a ridiculously large bathroom for ten minutes of shower and thought. Only the first few minutes of this stretch were spent on coming up with more appropriate epithets for that moony Seraph.

He spent the whole shower watching where he'd left his weapons, in easy arm's reach. Nothing walked in and asked to be shot; it was almost disappointing. Bullets seemed more effective than words for the next bit of difficulty. Sean had spent the better part of two centuries learning to sweet-talk mortals and angels alike, but that approach worked a lot better when not dealing with pig-stubborn angels convinced of their own righteousness. He could almost imagine he was working with Judgment again.

Penny was only two rooms away, having acquired at least as much sense as God gave muskrats, with the Calabite deposited on a couch. He'd chosen an airy second floor living room with a view of the lake, and was damn lucky they weren't expecting snipers.

Sean took a spot in the doorway, and folded his arms. "I'd like to know how, exactly, you decided on this location as 'safe'. Just...give me a hint, here. Anything special about this house that you haven't mentioned yet? Secret basement dock with a speedboat in it?"

"It belongs to a friend," Penny said. "And I knew it would be empty."

"How does empty make us safer?"

Penny blinked at him, that flicker-blink that was most common among Seraphim who didn't spend enough time on the corporeal to get it out of their system, as if this question had never occurred to him before. "I suppose it doesn't keep you or me much safer," he said. "If you'd rather go, I won't try to convince you otherwise."

"What that kid needs," Sean said, "is to wake up in a Tether where she can't bolt. If it weren't for you, that's what she would've gotten, too, the last time I ran into her. You can have all the time in the world that you want for chatting once we've set that up."

"I have a long-standing agreement," Penny said quietly. "Not to force the matter."

"And look where _that_ has been getting you." Sean refrained from rolling his eyes, because this was still the gentle persuasion part. "Look. What do you think is going to happen if we sit around until she wakes up, and ask nicely what she feels like doing? She could be setting you up--"

"No," Penny said. "Not intentionally."

"Intent isn't the _point_ , Most Holy." Sean dragged a hand through his hair, and took another one of those calming breaths. Some people respected rank, but no, not _this_ Seraph. Didn't Trade understand the concept of hierarchies, with their org charts and pay grades? "Assuming she's as innocent in all of this as a demon could possibly be--what then? What do you expect will happen? Because I'll tell you what I expect. She says something self-deprecatory, and looks awkward about it, and gets angry at my presence, and then she walks right the fuck back to that Djinn. Like she has every other time."

Penny gave him one of those looks unique to the proudest Choir in Heaven.

"Go ahead," Sean said. "Tell me she won't." No response to that, then. "Tell me, even, that you believe she won't."

"I will not force anyone in this matter, Intercessionist."

That was generally a sign of anger, when they started breaking out the formal Choir titles on the corporeal. Sean discovered that he didn't much mind the idea that he'd made the Seraph angry. Maybe he should've tried this line of discussion a lot earlier.

"So you can't make her pick the right choice," he said, "but you could at least make her pick a side. All this back and forth is a waste of your time and mine." He flicked a hand toward the enormous dark window. "And standing around in a place like this, lit up for anyone outside? Is god damn dangerous. How about we skip another few rounds of argument and whining, and get to a Tether where we have a defense against that Djinn inevitably coming back. That's what Djinn do, you know. Energizer bunnies of personal obsession, and I bet he's bringing friends."

"You can go," Penny said. "If you like."

Ten minutes of preparation had not been enough. "Like Trade wouldn't hold _that_ against me, when it inevitably got you killed. Or worse. No, we're going to a Tether, Peniel. We're stuffing that demon back in the car, and getting our asses into some place with a decent security system and the light of fucking Heaven around us before we're jumped. The Sword Tether I wanted to use in the first place just updated its system, it has people I know who will listen to me and aren't going to stab first--"

"No," Penny said.

"I don't see how you could stop me," Sean said. Maybe too cheerfully, because that was the point when the Seraph tried to punch him in the face.

Tried. It wasn't entirely embarrassing, because at least someone had demonstrated to Penny in the past how to make a fist and aim it, but still, the man was clearly more accountant than accurate. Sean ducked around the first swing, and swayed back in the other direction to avoid the second. "Case in point--" He caught the Seraph's wrist on a third attempt. Then had to use his other hand to grab Penny's _other_ wrist, because the man wasn't giving up, despite a complete lack of success or any hope of any. Case in point all over again. "Most _Holy_ , you're embarrassing yourself."

This was indubitably true, seeing as the Seraph didn't say anything response, but continued an earnest, impossible attempt to punch him in the face. Or possibly throttle him. It wasn't very clear, and Sean had already decided that letting go of those wrists long enough to find out precisely wasn't a good plan.

"What the hell," said a new voice in the room, "are you doing?"

Sean let go of Penny to look at the Calabite, who was in the process of levering herself upright on the couch. Even if he'd never seen this vessel before, he'd have recognized that tone of voice.

Her eyes narrowed. Not, wonder of wonders, at him, but at the Seraph, who was folding his arms as if attacking a Mercurian had never crossed his mind. "What the hell," Leo asked, "are _you_ doing here?"


	11. In Which We Work Out The Details

I am angry about so many things right now that I'm having trouble keeping track of them. Especially through this headache.

What the hell. Let's try a list. Everything that's happened over the last twenty-four hours has been terrible, so there's that. My partner sedating _me_? You'd think that would be against the rules, but no, apparently knocking me out isn't any more harmful than pouring alcohol into me, according to that Band. Having to see Sean: also not on the list of things I like on the best of days, much less as something to wake up to.

And Penny's not supposed to be here. I get one damn thing done, and someone still manages to fuck it up. I'm pretty sure I know who to blame, too.

"I received your message," Penny says. He looks more ruffled than usual. Maybe it's the heat outside. "It's good to see you again."

"You're not supposed to be here." I need a drink, and a re-do for this--I don't know, maybe this whole week. Year. (Life.) "What happened?"

"Don't look at me like that," Sean says, and he's already--huh. Yes, he's already looking annoyed, that's nothing new, but he's also sporting some exciting scratches all along his hands, and he stands like his right leg isn't real fond of him right now. Penny's not the one who's done any of that, no matter what they were doing when I woke up. "I get a message like that, and you expect me not to pass the news along?"

"Yes! You had one job, Sean. One. Job. You could have done anything you wanted with that message, and it would've been fine, except for _that_. Do you think I didn't have that number if I _wanted_ to call him?" I am not about to go look at Penny right now and find out how he feels about this, because his feelings are beside the point.

"I could have not come at all," Sean says, with that artificial brightness that says he's angry. Good. Someone else here should be. "Would you have preferred that?"

"Yes!"

"Leo," Penny says, so damn quietly, but it's not hard to hear him in this big clean room that's nothing like any place I should be, "why did you leave the message with him?"

"I wasn't thinking very clearly at the time."

"True on its own," Penny says, "but even you don't believe that's an answer to my question."

I can't storm out of the room when I'm not even sure my legs work very well yet. If there were a bed in sight, I'd be damn tempted to hide under there and hope everyone would just leave me be. But there's not. And if there were, Sean would probably grab a broom and try to poke me right back out.

Or Penny would sit on it and ask reasonable questions until I had to come out. Terrible idea. 

I scrub my face with the heels of my palms, as if that might help, but everyone is still there when I look again. "Never mind that. Is my partner in Trauma, or just irate?"

"Irate," Sean says. He keeps checking that big window. This probably isn't the safest room in this house to be having any sort of conversation, given that detail, and he'd know it. But I don't know what the rest of this house is like. Someone's vacation home, I think; it's too clean to be in current use. Maybe a rental, for the sort of people who rent two-story houses with a view for a week at a time. If I'm unlucky, Sean's brought friends along, and they're just downstairs.

Though now that I think about, I could have a lot worse luck than that.

"He'll be back." They should've figured this part out by now. I set my feet on the floor and test to see if I can stand up. Yes, with one hand bracing me against the couch, but the room's tilting around me. Walking isn't looking so good right now. "I should probably go."

"Did you call me just to get your partner shot?" Sean asks, still too cheerful. "Because there are easier ways to pull that off."

"It was in the range of possibilities. If you'll excuse me--"

"No," Sean says, "I don't think I will. Not until you give me some sort of explanation I can believe. Quite possibly not _then_ , either, but it might turn negotiable. Depending on what happened."

It's a little tricky to lie to him when Penny's standing right there. Here. Right _here_ , a step away, like it's useful to both of us to keep a little proximity. "I fucked up on a job, and my partner decided to deal with the consequences by passing them on to someone else. And now here we all are."

"That's charmingly vague." Sean shifts his weight--still favoring that one leg--and if I hadn't noticed before that he was standing in the only doorway to this room, well, I would now. "Try again, with more feeling. Or more detail."

"Or what? You fuck this up further? I think it's too late for that." I'd like to sit back down, if only to disguise how close I am to falling over. I give in to the urge since it's not like I'm going through that door, and--well, there's always the window, if I need to bolt. "Go away, Sean."

"Oh, no." His voice is sharper and merrier as he focuses, and that's supposed to be _my_ trick, not his. "You called me, and here I am. Tell me what you did that sent a job so south you were willing to get your partner shot to avoid the results."

"I was not," I snap back, and Penny looks at me. "I'm not--it's not like that. Sometimes jobs go bad, sometimes the consequences aren't so much fun, whatever. I don't sell out my own partner over--consequences." Maybe going out that window would be a good option after all. If I'm lucky, Sean will shoot me a few times on the way, and we can all skip the awkwardness that would come if I just broke my legs hitting the ground instead. "We got sent to retrieve something, I broke it, the buyer's going to take someone apart when he finds out, and that's how work runs on bad days. It's been a bad day. It's none of your business."

"You won't get him shot to avoid the consequences," Sean says. "You'd do it to keep him from inflicting those consequences on someone else. Has it occurred to you that you may be working for the wrong people?"

"There's nothing particularly angelic about playing favorites." I scrub at my face again. If this were taking place at that Flowers Tether, someone would've offered me a beer by now. "There. All the relevant details for how it went down. Satisfied? Maybe the two of you should go back to doing something actually angelic before my partner catches up with me. Or the buyer."

"Distincted?" Sean asks. That's a purely professional question, which I can appreciate at the moment.

"Baron. You probably don't want to meet him."

Sean shrugs, which means _no I don't_ coming from him. "Rough day. Why don't you come back to a nice safe Tether to talk about it some more?"

"Thanks, but no thanks."

"What happened," Penny asks, "that you think is so important, that you're not telling us?"

"Nothing," I say. That's practically Magpie reflex. And Penny just looks at me. "Nothing important." This isn't working. "It wasn't my fault." This is not working at all. "I didn't do anything unreasonable, my partner's always been an asshole, and none of it is relevant to the current situation. You should really go."

Penny covers his face in his hands, which is not really the reaction I was hoping for, here.

"There are days I'm especially glad I'm not a Seraph," Sean says conversationally. "So how about we--"

We all end up staring at the window at the thump there. Sean crosses the room fast, sideways and close to the wall. Then he says, in some disgust, "This doesn't open. I'll be right back. _Try_ to stay there for a minute, would you?"

"I'll see what I can do."

That Warrior moves fast when he wants to. I guess that's what he wants to do, right now. He's barely out of the door when Penny says to me, "Really?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"What part?"

"Any part. All of it. Let's just pretend none of the last day and a half happened." I would appreciate having him present more if I could actually cancel out everything I've done recently. For a while. "I was trying to keep you out of this mess."

"I know," Penny says. He's a Seraph, so he looks more comfortable standing than sitting, and right now, he's looking exceptionally Seraphic. Arch and angular, and a bit judgmental. "What were you hoping for? If I hadn't come after you."

Nothing that I've had to articulate before this point. "There are only so many phone numbers I know that are guaranteed to take me to an unlabeled message box."

"What if he'd arrived with allies from War? Or the Sword?"

"Then maybe I'd be in Trauma right now, and I--could use the nap, okay? Sometimes retrograde amnesia isn't the worst thing that could happen."

"Is that what you would've preferred?"

Sean's damn quiet when he wants to be, but I'm keeping an eye on the doorway, so I don't have to talk about any of this in front of him. There's an owl on his shoulder, and it's not Nik. I've seen the way she handles owls before.

"Hostiles incoming," he says.

"How many?" Penny asks, which isn't the right question.

"Four or five, and they're not on our doorstep, but they're close." Sean shrugs, as if this is of no consequence to him, but I don't think he's fooling either of us. Violence incoming means a Warrior pays a lot of attention to what's happening. "If you can get more details out of hooting, you're welcome to interrogate the Kyrio yourself. I'll translate."

Why they would even bring a Kyriotate who doesn't speak English on this trip, I don't--

I blink at the owl, and hold out an arm. "Eder?"

It leaves Sean's shoulder to perch on my forearm. Feathers puff up all about its ridiculous spherical form, then settle back down again. No Kyriotate in the world can look elegant in a perching owl.

I don't know if he even understands Helltongue anymore. So I give the owl a wry smile; in return, he steps his way sideways up my arm, until he's perched on my shoulder.

"Do you--" Sean shakes his head. "Never mind. We have incoming, and we're not equipped to deal with that force. More to the point, _I'm_ not, since I'm not expecting much from either of you."

"Not unless you packed explosives," I say. There is a strange comfort to having Eder on my shoulder. There's one person in this room who knows more or less where I'm coming from. "I told you that you'd better go."

"Do you know who's coming? Or what they're planning?" Sean's more intimidating when he gets focused like this. I can argue with him, I can run _circles_ around him in conversations when I'm feeling up to par, but I can't fight him. Not one on one.

"My partner. He's the one who can find me--wherever we are." There's a white landscape in my head, like snow across a South Dakota plain with an empty highway running through. If I think about that space--endless driving, nothing to worry about but the road ahead--then maybe I can be...calm.

I am not feeling particularly calm.

"That Djinn," Sean prompts, "and what about the other people?"

"How long was I out?"

"Why does it--"

"We don't know exactly," Penny says, "but it's been nearly two hours since we found you."

Two hours since Zhune was shot. He has friends everywhere, but not in high concentrations. Friends who will loan out an apartment. Not the kind to drive towards trouble in a group, not without a lot of convincing. "It's the Baron," I say, and I almost do feel calm at this point. "Zhune probably told him...mm. That I have the artifact, and angels kidnapped me, so the way to the artifact is to get me back. Some variant of that. He'd make it plausible."

"And not," Sean says, "that you've betrayed him and need to be stopped?"

"No. He hasn't told them that." The owl brushes feathers against the side of my face. "The Baron wouldn't care about that. You should probably go now."

"We should go," Penny says, rather pointedly. And it almost hurts until I realize he just means--driving away.

"Not down the driveway," Sean says. "I could disappear in a night like this, but how well is that going to work for anyone else in the room?"

"You should go," I say, and try to break it down for Penny, because Sean gets this, and Penny...either doesn't understand, or doesn't want to. "Four of them and four of us doesn't mean much when I can barely walk, and Eder shouldn't be risking any hosts. But you can just ascend. They're not on top of us, so you have time now, while it's still safe."

"Much as I hate to say this," Sean says, "the Calabite makes a good point. We chose the wrong place to retreat, and there's no good exit. Not with that team coming in. Best thing to do is leave now, Most Holy."

And really, it's no worse than if no one had shown up at all.

"No," Penny says.

"Tactically speaking--"

"I don't dispute the tactics," Penny says, and it's always a small joy to see him talk right over Sean. "Only the decision. You may certainly retreat before those demons arrive. It would be sensible of you. Eder ought to do the same. I don't intend to leave."

I thought I was past being afraid, and apparently I'm not yet. "Penny, you don't understand what those people would do to you."

"And once again, I agree with the Calabite." Sean's losing some of his cool. I can't even appreciate that right now. "The time to make other travel arrangements was--some time ago. When we could have gone to a fucking Tether, like I wanted to."

Penny ignores him entirely. Words on the wind. "Leo," he says, "I will never force your choices. You have the right to make them for yourself. I have the same right for myself. You may do as you like, but I am not leaving you this time. Not again."

"I can't stop these people. I _can't_. And if my partner walks in here and--says damn near anything, I will, nine times out of ten, do something that I will regret later, and regretting it doesn't _change_ anything." I stand up. It seems important, even if I wobble. "Please. Just go."

"We choose our own risks," Penny says. He is serene, and not as Zhune is when he's playing at lack of concern. More like he made up his mind already and doesn't need to think about the decision anymore.

There is no way in hell--no way on heaven or earth--that I will change the mind of a Seraph convinced of his own decision before those people hit. Eder is rocking uneasily on my shoulder, though I expect he'll get really noisy before anyone hits the front door.

"Hey, Sean." I pull on a smile, shaky though it may be, to counter the wariness of his look. "You have friends, don't you?"

"Several," Sean says. "Your point?"

"I mean, I bet you could ascend to your Heart, call for help, and just...bring people back down. Right here."

"You're not worth an official War strike team," Sean says, "emergency or otherwise. Sorry." He almost sounds like he means that last word.

"Unofficial. A favor for you. You have _friends_ , and what kind of friends are they if they won't do you a favor? Don't you Warriors like an excuse to shoot at the other side?" My smile's fixed, a lot closer to a snarl than I want it to be. "Let's make a deal, Sean."

"I will catch hell," he says, "if I make as much noise as what you're asking for. Unauthorized." That's not the same as no. "What are you offering?"

I spread my hands, empty. So I'm shaking a little. Not enough to knock Eder off my shoulder. "What do you want?"

(Penny hasn't said a thing, in this. He wouldn't. He won't. He understands making a deal.)

"If I pull this off," Sean says, "we take you to a nice friendly Tether of ours, and you sit down there and talk to people, and you finish things. Understand? One way or another. No more of this 'gosh I can't decide' shit."

"Not a Sword Tether." Not that one particular Sword Tether, but I don't have time to explain why. Even if Penny may know by now.

"It can be a damn _Flowers_ Tether for all I care. Deal?"

"Deal."

"You'll keep your end of this bargain," Sean says mildly, "or I will track you down and kill you. Most Holy, tell him I mean it."

"Insofar as he ever intends to keep his promises," Penny says, "he does."

"Yeah, that's fair," I say, and sit back down, because there is nowhere to run anyway. "Go. Find your theoretical friends. Tell them it's time to have some fun."

Sean's smile is much nastier than mine was. He ascends to Heaven.

This will hurt least if I don't think about any of it too hard.


	12. In Which We Pick A Direction

Penny sits down beside me. Seraphim shouldn't do a lot of sitting, in human vessels; they never look comfortable.

He rests his shoulder against mine, and Eder steps down until he has one owl foot on each of us.

"I'm really doing this," I say. Like that will make it more real, or less.

"The matter of the Tether?"

"No. I mean. Yes. That. I said I would, if he comes through. Not thinking about it right now. I mean--I'm selling my partner out. Honestly and truly. Betraying him to the forces of Heaven, and I'm doing it properly this time, instead of in some sort of plausible deniability way where I just called the wrong person and let things...happen." I wrap my hands over my knees. "The first time you saw me, I was selling out my girlfriend. Ex. Ex-girlfriend, by that point. You must think it's a habit."

"Not particularly," Penny says.

"And I sent Nik to Judgment, without telling her. And I traded Luna to those angels. And I left Katherine with angels, telling her I'd be back to pick her up." There are holes in the knees of my new jeans, now. Of course there are. "What kind of person do you think I am?"

"I think you're a person worth saving."

Sean reappears in a burst of disturbance. The previous rattle of his ascension hasn't worn off yet, and now it's building up. Zhune has to know--I don't know what he's going to conclude, but he has to know that someone left, and someone came back.

I wonder if he knows I'm awake.

Another angel descends. The blink and you'll miss it of an enormous Seraph, and then she's a tall woman with close-shaved hair. She flashes a grin at me, and heads for the door. Not even waiting for the next two who drop down. (Cherub. Kyriotate. Eder wobbles on my shoulder to see the latter, but that Hive has a vessel of its own. A perk of working for War.) They're on her heels, as she rattles off instructions in--god, that's angelic. Another Vassal of War, and I shouldn't be surprised that some of Sean's friends are his peers.

Sean points to Penny, when the Seraph might stand up. "Oh no. You stay _here_. Your Kyrio will tell us if you're about to get jumped, and otherwise, you wait where it's safe. The last thing I need is for you to walk into a bullet and this idiot to decide that means I didn't keep my end of the bargain."

Penny stiffens beside me. "I am capable of--"

"Don't care! _Stay_ , Most Holy." Sean strides away, calling out instructions or commentary that I can't understand.

The noise isn't deafening--especially not in comparison to that incident with the Lightning tech--but it's damn loud, and clear warning to anyone approaching that there's a lot more to deal with than they originally counted on. Maybe they'll back off. Make other plans. Maybe Zhune will have the sense to not get into a fight where he's outclassed.

"I expect," Penny says, "that the Warriors can handle this."

There are ways to deal with four Warriors in a house not designed for defense. Most of those ways depend on having spent more time planning for that than I expect out of anyone on the approach. "Yeah," I say. "Probably."

I still twitch at the first gunshot.

"Someone's going to call the police. This house doesn't go with a neighborhood where people don't."

"If so," Penny says, "I imagine we'll find a way to deal with that, too."

"Sure. We can deal. With things."

He lays a hand on his own knee. Mirror of mine, instead of putting his hand over mine, and I think he's just--being careful. Trying not to make me feel trapped. Oh, it's considerate enough, but the only trap in this place I built for myself. There were so many points where I could've done something different.

The person who would've acted differently is the person who wouldn't be me.

"I couldn't do it," I say. "Not if he were here in front of me." Thunder cracks, but the disturbance says it's the Song, not the weather phenomenon. That's probably Zhune. We're out of range. "That's why I'm taking the cheap way out. Someone else does all the dirty work for me. I don't have the guts to do this to his face."

"As I understand it," Penny says, "your partner has been far from virtuous in his behavior toward you. Lately in particular. Is that any better because he did it directly?"

A howl echoes through the night. A human voice--well, a human vessel, and I think that's an angelic voice. Even this far away, walls between us, it makes me shiver. "Maybe. I could deal with nearly anything, so long as it was only him doing it."

Penny doesn't say anything. His hand, a mirror of mine. So I slide my hand over beneath his, and try not to feel--all the ways I feel right now. More like a highway through the snowy fields. No turns, no exits. Easy choices and simple answers.

What a lot of gunfire that is outside. Though it doesn't go on for long.

My partner is a terrible person, who does terrible things. Sometimes to me. Maybe he's dead, now. Maybe he's not. It won't be permanent regardless. He's too smart to risk losing Forces, in a situation like this. Maybe he's slipped out of this whole mess to figure out another line of approach. He's clever and very experienced, and so much more patient than I am. He's probably fine.

If he's fine, it's not my doing. If he's dead, it's entirely my fault. I am trying not to care. He's lost partners before. He's lost vessels before. This is not the first time anything like this has happened to him.

"I'm sorry," Penny says.

"Why?"

"Because you're hurt," he says. And he gives no more explanation than that.

The audible type of noise dies down well before the disturbance does.

I try to think about what happened with that friend of Zhune's to see if it makes me feel better about any of this, but it doesn't. So I stop thinking about that, and try to work out the layout of the rest of the house from this room and where I've heard footsteps. I'm not clear on the floorplan for the first story, but I can make a good guess based on what this sort of house usually has. This vacation home is too expensive for someone to take risks, not expensive enough to use an architect who made a name on those risks. It'll be something standard. Not so cookie-cutter that I could walk through blindfolded, but close to it.

Eder gives us a sleepy hoot of warning before Sean shows up again. His shirt's coated in blood, and he grins like he held the weapon that caused all of it. "That's taken care of," he says. "Fun for the whole family. Everyone else is taking the Baron's car, and they'll deal with the bodies. You might want to call in whoever owns this place to deal with the blood, but most of it's inside the gates, so if no one looks too closely, no problem! Until then--"

He's interrupted by the tall woman--yet another Seraph, I can't seem to escape them lately--who slings an arm over his shoulders, and peers into the room. She asks a short question in that peculiar music that's the corporeal form of angelic speech.

Sean flushes, and responds briefly in the same. 

I look to Penny, who must've understood that. "Should I even ask?"

"Maybe another time," Penny murmurs. While the War Seraph claps Sean on the shoulder, and strides away laughing.

"In _any_ case," Sean says, "that's my side of the bargain. So pick a Tether, Leo. Ideally something near enough that we can reach it before your Prince notices he's missing a Baron, and starts checking on Hearts."

"What's in range?" Someone say Flowers. There are so few Malakim in Flowers Tethers, to see inconvenient things in my head.

"Sword, Wind..." Sean shrugs. "I don't know the area very well."

"Fire," Penny says, and shoots me an apologetic look that I probably don't deserve. "Judgment."

"If you pick Judgment, I'm dropping you off at the back door and driving away."

"Not Judgment." I close my eyes a moment, and see nothing but black. No helpful illusions left. "How far to Trade?"

"Too far," Penny says, "if we'd like to be cautious." He ripple-blinks, and says, "Revelation. I'd nearly forgotten. It's new, and small."

"There's no escaping Seraphim," I say. And to Penny, "Sorry. No offense meant. Revelation. I'll take it. I don't think I've stolen anything from them lately."


	13. An Interlude, In Which I Tidy Up

Penny was worried. Worried and hopeful and only afraid now for people other than himself. He had enough faith in the Mercurian to expect the car to reach the right destination; that was no difficulty. But in the back seat, he had a Calabite holding on to him, and shaking. An irregular tremor as some thought or memory set it off again.

"I need you to stop the car," Leo said.

"We're in a hurry," Sean said. "It can wait until the Tether."

"No. Really. Stop the car. _Please_."

The Mercurian, who was making more put-upon faces with every mile, pulled off to the highway's shoulder. "What's so important--hey, wait!"

Leo scrambled across Penny's lap, out of the car. She dropped to her knees on the asphalt, and threw up.

Sean was out of the car fast enough to see that happen. "Oh, hell," he said. "Side effect of the drugs?"

"No, you idiot," Leo said. "I'm _scared_." She sat back on her heels. "And that's not any more fun with nothing in my stomach."

"Do you need to stop for a drink?" Penny asked, because he couldn't think of anything more useful to offer.

"No. Hurrying is best." She took his hand for help in standing up. "I feel like--never mind."

"So let's hurry," Sean said. "Back in the car."

"Can I borrow an Essence?" Leo smiled crookedly at Penny. "I'll probably pay you back."

Penny held onto her hand, and gave her what she'd asked for.

She took a shaking breath, and changed. One vessel to another, and he'd never seen the second one. A perfectly ordinary man, of the ethnicity most common in the country, who could blend into a crowd. It looked nothing like the first vessel of Leo's that he'd seen before, or the image the Calabite had worn in the Marches.

"I'm not supposed to let angels match this one to me," Leo said. His smile skewed further to the side. "That's what the Boss told me. I guess I'm doing all sorts of things I shouldn't, tonight."

He got back in the car, and Penny followed.


	14. In Which I Argue

Penny wasn't kidding about the Revelation Tether being small. It's exactly half of a shared office space on the seventh floor of a dark building; you can tell which of the desks in the room belong to the newspaper by the clean slice dividing the Light Of Heaven, in all its capitalized terror, from ordinary space.

A little bitty Tether, and that's still enough concentrated divine power to burn my Forces to ash, if I took my true form in this place.

The Seneschal's waiting for us there, lights on and a coffee pot going. (I suppose Penny texted ahead; it's not as if I was paying very close attention to that sort of thing in the car.) I can't place her Choir, though I suppose Cherub's the most common for that job. She's almost as tall as Penny, hair held back in a pencil-stuck bun, and there's an efficiency to her motion that says she has things to do and places to go. But what she says is, "Sorry not to have a better welcoming committee. We only have one angel on staff, and she's across town right now doing tech support."

"God," Sean mutters, arms folded. "Tell me you have more security than what this building comes with on its own."

"Not really," says the woman, while I try to figure out if I misheard, or misidentified her, or if Revelation actually has a human acting as Seneschal for one of its Tethers. I suppose that's one way to get around their relentless truth-telling. _Hi, I'm Bob, Cherub of Revelation_ doesn't work well for holding down a Role. "We're not a high-profile target and we don't have anything more valuable on hand than you'd find outside a Tether. The locus extends as far as that break room there, if you want a place to sit down."

Sean frowns at the office in general, and follows the rest of us to the break room, which smells of burnt popcorn. Irate Warrior wants to ditch, now that he's left me at a Tether, but he's as much a professional as I am, if in a different field. Walking away from here when we're this undefended isn't going to make him happy.

"Does the cat need anything?" the woman asks. "We have...popcorn, I think. And probably some pasta cups somewhere around here."

"It's currently a Kyriotate," I say. Eder's perched on my shoulder like he was as an owl, tail flicking back and forth as I walk to keep balance. Maybe it's just as well it's still the middle of the night, and there aren't any other mortals around to ask awkward questions. "Unless you happen to know of a good home for cats, afterward? I don't think it's been anywhere great for its health."

"Nothing that comes to mind," she says. She's remarkably calm about all this. Maybe angels from other Words wander into her Tether every day. I can't imagine any Theft Seneschal being this laid back about late night arrivals, even from friendly Words. (Not that there are many of those.) "Sorry about that. What can I help the rest of you with?"

Then everyone looks at me, and I feel like I'm going to throw up again.

"You can do as you like," Penny says.

"Like hell she can," Sean says. "We made a deal."

"Your new concern for the terms of a verbal agreement," Penny says, "is fascinating."

I wonder if Penny will try to hit him again, if this conversation goes on long enough. Tempting as it is to find out, I am stalling, and the longer I fail to make a choice--the more that's like a choice. "Sean," I say, just as he's opening his mouth, "can I ask you for a favor?"

He has a quick smile for that, though it's not a very happy one. "You can ask."

"Would you check in with Eder about what he wants done with this host? And then take care of that? It's a long way from home, and I imagine he wants it either taken back home, or found a better one."

Sean rolls his shoulders. It makes a few of the places where he carries weapons more apparent. "Yeah, sure," he says. "But first tell me where I can find something that'll let me track down your former partner. There's enough blood on that shirt in the trunk to find his old vessel again, but since it's not attached to him anymore, that doesn't help me much."

The problem with the war is that you love more than one person, you'll end up betraying one of them. Or maybe all of them. I suppose Zhune knew that, when he told me to make that call. He just thought I'd make a different choice.

"There's nothing," I say. It's not the answer he wanted. "He never kept anything long enough for it to be something a Song could track back to him. A matter of principle. Sorry." And everything in that response is true, except the last word.

Sean rolls his eyes. "Worth asking. Yes, I'll drive your cat back to the Wind Tether. Try not to die or run away while I'm not looking, would you? I'm running out of leave time at this rate."

I hand Eder over. "Thank you." Sean starts up a conversation that's angelic on his end and helpful meowing on the other.

Penny's been so damn quiet this last hour. I wish he'd just tell me what I'm supposed to do.

But that's not the kind of thing he does.

The Seneschal waves the coffee pot at all of us. "Coffee? Popcorn? Invocation? If you're not going to give me a story, at least tell me what you need."

"Coffee, thank you," Penny says. I wave off the offer. The last thing I need right now is--oh, let's not finish that sentence accurately, thanks, but I don't particularly want anything new to throw up, either.

I sit down in at a scratched folding table and don't quite listen to the conversations around me. Penny and the Seneschal talking coffee and sleep schedules, Sean and Eder discussing what to do with that host, and me here in the middle of a Tether--well, rather on its edge--with nothing good to say.

I could chase my motivations in circles for hours, here. Work out exactly what my options are, and what it's too late to change.

Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

"I need to talk to someone," I say to Penny. I think I'm interrupting someone, but I haven't been tracking that exactly, and besides, _he's_ willing to drop that conversation the instant I ask. (I wonder if that'll last. If not, I should enjoy the attention while I have it.) "I mean. Your boss. If he would. I think that's how it works."

Penny has his phone in hand almost before I've finished speaking, thumb tapping across the screen. And even Sean stops to watch this.

"Don't tell me that you _text_ your Archangel, Most Holy."

"Certainly not," Penny says. "I text the usual number, which goes to a queue in a Tether for sorting and then forwarding upstairs to his secretary as appropriate."

Sean looks pained. Never would've thought he'd be the type to stand on ceremony. It must be a day for exciting new learning experiences. "Doesn't Trade care anything for tradition?"

"Traditionally," Penny says, "we try to get work done as quickly as reasonable."

"You may have heard of this process called 'invocation', where--"

"Sean," I say, "would you please shut up?"

My least favorite Mercurian looks me over. "Do you need a bucket?"

"Do I get to throw it at you?"

"You could try," Sean says.

"Someone probably ought to apologize for all this," Penny says the Seneschal, and I have to admire his wording.

"It's no problem," she says, leaning against the counter with her coffee in hand. "More information about cross-Word and cross-Choir interactions, right? I have a line in with some people in Lightning who say they'd look over the paper I'm writing up on it, so long as I use their encryption at every stage."

Penny checks his phone again. "My Lord asks permission to use your Tether for a meeting, ma'am."

"That was fast," Sean says, and the eyebrow raise from the woman suggests she's thinking exactly the same. As am I. Superiors don't show up thirty seconds after you put a request in the queue, when it's not an emergency, and this isn't--I'm not--I mean, there's nothing _emergency_ about this.

I am almost certainly not important enough for the Boss to stop by an enemy Tether to object to my defection. Even if it's a small Tether with lousy security. (Of course they keep nothing valuable here. I could rob this place in my sleep. If I slept.) There's no hurry, and I wish I had a chance to get at least half of the way to drunk first.

"He's more than welcome," she says, "if he'll drop in far enough away that the disturbance isn't shaking anything here. We're still on the fragile side."

"I could take this Tether out with two relievers and a shaped charge," Sean mutters, while Penny texts back. "You know, if you'd like a quick security assessment, I could make some recommendations..."

"I probably won't take any of your advice," says the Seneschal pleasantly, "but I'd be happy to hear your advice. Most Mercurians just offer me advice about dating and interview techniques."

"You shouldn't get those tips from Mercurians," Sean says. "We cheat, since we can see a lot that you can't." He slings Eder's host over his shoulder. "Let me show you what I mean over at the windows in the main room. And I'd like to see your fire safety routes. Do you do drills?"

"Drills require more of a top-down hierarchical structure than we really have around here," the woman says.

The door closes behind them. Sean is being, in his own way, kind to me. I'll owe him for that later if there is a later. This would be really annoying if I weren't so overwhelmed that all my emotional responses have flatlined.

The light of Heaven is everywhere, and I promised not to walk away from it this time.

"Is it impolite," I ask Penny, "to call for a different Archangel than a Tether belongs to?"

"Potentially," he says.

"Maybe I can apologize later."

"I don't think that'll be necessary." He glances towards--nothing in particular that I can see. Listening to disturbance that I can't hear, I suspect. "Are you sure about this?"

"You can't be trying to talk me _out_ of this, Penny. Especially after you've made an appointment with your--" I find myself skidding away from any of the appropriate words. "Isn't this what you want?"

"Yes," he says. "Is it what you want?"

I slide down in my chair, hands over my face. "Damned if I know. It's what I'm doing. Can we leave it at that?"

"If you'd--" He hesitates, and I know a Seraph deciding to rephrase a statement when I hear one. "We can talk about it later. Or not, as you prefer."

I would say _if there is a later_ , but I think it would upset him. And really I have enough upset in this room to cover both of us.

"God," I say, "I wish I had a beer. Or a cigarette."

"I didn't think to pack any."

"I didn't mean that as criticism. I'm just saying." I lace my fingers together and lay my hands on the table. "Do they even have beer in Heaven?"

"Certainly," Penny says, as if he can't figure out why I'd need to ask the question.

"Is it any good?"

"I've heard so. I don't really drink it often myself."

"Cigarettes?"

"In some places. They're not as popular."

"Huh. Go figure. I kinda would've taken the place to be more..." I pull my hands apart so that I can wave one around. "Puritan."

"The Catholics are better represented among celestials who choose to follow a religion, actually."

"Oh, right. Sword, Judgment. All that." I dig into my pockets, unsteady like I still have drugs running through my system. It must be all adrenaline by now. "Here."

Penny looks down at the coin I'm offering him. "That was a gift, Leo."

"Yes, but you know where I am, now. So you might as well hold onto it." In case this doesn't work. I'm not going to say that out loud, and I'd rather he not make me.

"Even so--"

"I don't have anything else to give, okay? So. Please."

He takes the penny back. And the door opens.

An Archangel can look like anything he damn well pleases, exactly as a Prince can. Marc looks like Penny. Not in the face, he's not the same race or height or age, it's just--the way he walks, okay? Like if Penny were a Mercurian instead, and had a different vessel, he would move exactly like that. He makes a little motion when I'm about to stand, and I keep my seat, and it's not even like a command. Just. Polite.

He sits down at the same folding table, and it is too impossibly grubby for him. Which I suppose means it suits me fine. You'd think a Heavenly Tether could manage a clean table for its break room, just in case an Archangel stopped by.

The Archangel of Trade lays a hand briefly on Penny's shoulder, but he's facing me as he says, "It's good to finally meet you."

I make a noise that is meant to resemble polite agreement and sounds a lot more like I just got kicked.

"Be not afraid," Marc says, and his smile's nothing like Valefor's. Even if he is, I think, a touch amused. "Really. I want to employ you, not terrify you."

" _Why_?" He's not a Seraph, and I don't know what good it does to ask in the first place. Maybe I'd be better off saying nothing at all.

"Once upon a time," he says, "you saved a human child from the War, at some cost to yourself. And then you left a place of safety to do it again. I am a Mercurian, Leo, and that sort of thing matters to me."

"That was a long time ago," I say, because I do not want to think about Katherine right now.

"Should we talk about more recent additions to your resume? You sent Eder back to me, Leo, and I've been missing them since the hour they left me."

"I was just paying a debt," I say. "It's not like I was--trying to help you in particular."

The Archangel of Trade looks...arch. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Penny shifts where he sits, quiet as ever, but oh, he recognized that one. Thanks to a particular Habbalite I served in college, I recognize that line too. "You also seem to have saved a Mercurian of mine, and a Cherub in my service, from some kind of watery doom in the Marches."

"And then I ran off with the artifact you sent them for."

"Luna has sworn to my service," he says. "I think I got the better end of that deal. When you add these all up, it looks to me like I'm in your debt."

"No," I say, and I find I still have it in me to be angry. "That's not fair. You're palming a card." I am accusing the Archangel of Trade of cheating, and the only reason I even feel awkward about that is that Penny looks disconcerted to hear this from me. "I've robbed your Tethers and a few of your Servitors, and I may have put some of them in Trauma. It's not like I was keeping close track. I have done terrible things in the service of Hell, and I've done terrible things just because it was _convenient_ to me at the time. You can't act like none of that counts just because once in a while my whims happened to line up with what you want. It isn't fair."

He's not angry at me. Why should he be? I'm no threat at all to him. "It's the privilege of the one who holds the debt," Marc says, "to forgive it. And it's the privilege of an Archangel to take on the debts of their Servitors."

"It can't be that easy."

"It's not easy. It's simple. Two different things." He's not smiling anymore, which may be for the best. I can't bear to have him treat this so lightly. "Have you heard of the year of Jubilee?"

"Vaguely?"

"Pity. I thought it was a good idea, but it's hard to push for social change on that scale." He sits back, as comfortable in this smelly little break room as he ought to be in board room, sitting at the head of a table. "It's the year when slaves are freed, debts are canceled, and what's been sold away in desperation is returned to those who once held it. Not all debts are paid, Leo. Sometimes they're canceled, whether by death or forgiveness. I prefer the latter when it can be arranged."

"You can't guarantee it."

"No," he says. "I can't. I can only help you try. You risk death, and I get a chance to see debts forgiven. You give me your service, and I will give you a chance to make the world better in a way you never could as you are now. Will you?"

This is the point where I am supposed to say yes.

And what I say is, "I need to ask a favor."

He motions me to go ahead. Hell.

"I need," I say, and this hurts, "to ask this one without you here, Penny."

This hurts because Penny is hurt. Even if he'd never say so. He stands up, and his hand on my shoulder is like Marc's on his. "I'll see you later," he says, so he must believe it.

I'm so tired of being afraid.

"My partner," I say to the Archangel, when we're alone. "Ex. Partner. He has his own secrets. Just...one. That's really important. And I can't put together much regret for selling out Valefor, since he stole me in the first place, but I can't--it's about Judgment. I mean. They talk to the Game. They _do_ , everyone knows it, and what I tell them about him, they'll tell the Game, and I can't do that to him. Not that."

"I can't control Judgment," Marc says. "I could give you orders not to speak of something with them, though. What's the secret?"

"Just. That he used to work for the Game." I wonder how many of Zhune's friends know. Or other people, friends or not. Not so many that anyone's ever sold him out, in all these thousands of years. Not until me.

"Really," Marc says, thoughtful and not at all disbelieving. "I don't think that's information Judgment needs to know. Don't speak to them about it until I tell you otherwise."

"Thank you."

He doesn't dismiss that, either. Nods to it, as if my thanks actually means anything. "Is there anything else?"

"I would like to do this," I say, "before I can't."

He stands up, and offers me a hand. "Would you like Penny to be here?"

"God, no. I'll just--see him on the other side." I stand up, and put my hand in his before I can think about this any further and remind myself of all the ways this is the worst idea of my life. Such as it's been.

"This will hurt," Marc says.

"Most things do."

"But not forever." His hand's secure around mine. And yet I think I could let go, at any time. "It will hurt, and then the pain will stop. Are you ready?"

"Not at all. Let's go. Before I change my mind."

It's like walking off the roof of a skyscraper, to step into the light of Heaven.


	15. An Epilogue

It's a lot like what Ash once said to me. Here, the sky goes all the way up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of Leo's arc. He'll show up in other arcs, and have his own short stories and meandering aftermath bits, even aside from his continuing story in the AU... But the real arc of the story about Leo, the Calabite? This is where it stops.


End file.
